Who fails to plan plan to fail. The importance of a Business Plan

Your journey to success begins by learning how to plan.

I can't emphasise enough on the importance of planning in our everyday life.
Some people sent their entire life wondering why some people are more successful than others and my explanation is quite simple: successful people do plan.

Failure is something natural and should not scare people. In order to mitigate risks of failure, one technique that will never disappoint is planning. Plan for everything and you'll live a better life.
Planning is a proven process to improve things, however it's not taught at schools and we are not doing it naturally on the most efficient way.

The benefits of planning in your everyday life will soon offset the hassle of doing it.

Process of planning is quite easy:

1. Resources Valuation.
Before acting, stop and think. Deconstruct the task, job, project into several steps. Then evaluate the resources that would be needed to accomplish each step.

Available resources are: time, skills, tools and raw material.

• Time is the number of hours that the people allocated to the job will do to do it from beginning to the end. As an entrepreneur that would be your time mostly. 
• Skills is the know how to perform the tasks. You can learn those skills yourself or hire someone who got them. The cheap way usually seen as doing it yourself, but that would limit your available time.
• Tools are piece of equipment that are necessary to perform the tasks and that will not be consumed in the task.
• Raw material are the physical items that are essential for the task and that will go away once consumed.

Therefore any task, job or chore in our everyday life could be reduced to that. 

There are some examples:

Cooking a meal for your family requires time (some tried to reduce it by applying the 30 minute meals technique), skills (you can cook), tools (kitchen utensils) and raw material (ingredients). 

Bathing the kids will require less skills than sewing a new dress and repairing the cars' broken air-con will require less time and skills than just washing it.

Evaluate the need of each of the 4 keys components needed for a task is the first step for successful planning. Most of the people make this in their head, which is fine for basic tasks but it's not the most efficient way to optimize it. putting things down on paper is more useful than you think.

2. Sequencing

Now you have a technical view of the tasks of each step of your project, think of organizing the sequence of each steps. It might sounds silly at first glance, but you would be surprised to see the amount of resource wasted by poor planning just because the sequence of the actions to perform a simple basic task have not be properly set up. 

Example: washing the car is a task I've allocated to my son. Therefore I ask him to allocate the next 30 minutes to it (time) I give him a sponge and a bucket (tools) and some soapy water in it (raw material). He knows how to do it because last time he did help me to do it (skills). I though he had all what it take to do it perfectly. But I forgot to ensure he knew the sequence to do it on the most efficient way. Result: he washed the doors first, then the bonnet and the windows and ended by the roof. Then he realized that by doing this he was spilling water over the rest of the car and he had to wipe it again. He realized that if he would have begun by the roof, he would not have to clean the doors twice.

We can find similar examples everywhere around us.

Poor sequencing leads to wasting your resources.

3. Do and adjust. 

Once the resources needed are identified and ready to use in a well established sequence, you think you have a plan and then you can start performing the task/job/project. 

Most of all, you should be aware that is is very risky to stick to the plan at all costs.

Some of the people I've advised for planning went back with bad feedback saying it didn't work.

They did follow step one and two above then they forgot one thing: we are not perfect people with the ability to foresee everything. We have to keep in mind that during the performance of a task we encounter unexpected difficulties that were not properly identified before. 

Therefore, you would need to review the plan.

A plan is not cast in stone: it's a living thing that would need to be adjusted when required.

A contingency in the plan is totally ok. The way we react to it will determine our chances of success. Instead of seeing it as a reason to give up and abandon the task, successful people see them as chances to improve their plan and become more efficient. That's par of the learning curve.

As you can see, the process of planning is a never-ending cycle. Once step 1 and 2 are done, which is a stage few people do systematically, most individuals stop there and then stick to an inefficient first version of their plan. Successful people redo step 1 and 2 once they encounter an issue or spotted an deficiency that could be improved. That's how Human Evolution lead us to where we are.

A simple example in your everyday life: never waste food again.

Since I've got kids, time has become a scarce resource for me. Money become tight too. 

It broke my heart to see that at the end of the week, I had to throw food away because it went off in my fridge even though I had the genuine intention to eat it. One day. I didn't clearly know exactly when precisely but I didn't want to throw it in the bin.

Apparently I am not the only one in that case: about 10% of the food purchased is thrown away in our modern world. One out of 10 pieces of food, that's shockingly gigantic!

What is the explanation? > Poor planning.

Since I decided to reduce our amount of food wastage and decided to act. 

So we started to plan. 

Every Saturday, My wife and me sit for an hour and think of what we'd like to eat during the week. That's a mini brain storming about our preferences. We usually end up with a dozen of dishes, Then we spread them over the week for dinners for the week to come. Some ideas are rejected and/or kept aside for the next week. 

We keep in mind that this list will be the basis for identifying our resources needed to cook those meals, aka the shopping list. So the ingredients with the shorted sell-by date will be cooked earlier in the week.

By doing so, we were able to choose only dishes that were simple to prepare and that we like. We also have a better control about having variety in our diet and eat of everything throughout the week.

Since we clearly identified exactly what we needed and nothing more, the weekly shopping chore is much faster and easier and above all cheaper. For example, we do take into consideration the season because seasonal products are cheaper.

It was hard to start and the first week was not that efficient. We never had done that before and we didn't die, so why should we change our habits?

After four weeks, this became our ritual. We now sometimes take ideas in the recipe books that we never open before, which includes more variety in our diet. 

The plus side are that we never fight about what to cook for tonight or who will cook, which is a huge benefit in our marital life.

Since then we barely throw food away, The few items we bin are usually those that we purchased while they weren't on the list. So we made savings, huge savings. The money saved downstream is the reward for the time spend planning upstream. That is definitively time well spent.

This is more ecological and we have better control over our diet. Consequence of it it that we generally feel better, sleep better, I even lost a little bit of weight!

Planning for cooking has been a success for our family. We feel we've got control, we generally feel better and we feel more successful. 

And that's what differentiate successful people from the other.

Any time I see a messy thing (garden, house, fridge, office) I think into myself: that smell the lack of planning. Lack of planning leads to wastage of resources.

A messy place have "Poor Panning" written all over it. That's not how successful people leave their life.

You too want to stop wasting your resources? 

Start planning. 

Now.