Within my last post I talked briefly about planning one's activities so that you can free your mind of things you have to do and just get them done. I realized today that telling people to plan in that fashion hits a lot of deaf ears, because it seems planning is a lost art.

Goal List for Sticky Notes
Laura Smith via Compfight

I've always been someone who has plans for this or that. I'm not a serial planner, and that's probably a problem because I think I'd get a lot more done overall if I planned all the time. However, I plan a lot; let me share a little bit of it with you.

I mentioned that I use C. J. Hayden's Get Clients Now to help me plan certain things. That's actually a monthly planner, so you put in things you want to get finished for the month and then use the planner to keep you on track as much as possible. Long term planning is a good thing, but without short term planning it doesn't do a lot of good.

Since I mainly work in my home office, my first plan every morning is to get to the gym. I've been going regularly since May, and it's become almost a way of life. There are a few mornings here and there when I can't get to the gym, but overall I like to get it out of the way so the rest of my day can be dedicated to other things.

I've found that I have to plan my meals. I'm on a metabolic eating plan, and two of the things it's making me do is have at least 3 meals a day and making sure I eat enough food. I'm also not supposed to go more than 4 hours between meals, and when I don't plan things out, I tend to go longer. That leads to snacking, which I'm supposed to limit, and that's the purpose of eating more food at my regular meals. Hey, I've been losing weight, so I really need to stick with this one.

When I plan my week, I try to use my knowledge of how I like to do things to my maximum benefit. For instance, marketing day is Monday. I rarely like to write anything of substance, other than blog posts, on a Monday, so it's the best day of the week for me to try to reach out to both new and previous clients. I will admit that marketing isn't the best thing I do, but having a day dedicated to it works for me. The rest of the days I plan out which projects I'm going to do and for how long.

I plan my break time, and of course I plan when I'm supposed to eat. I plan my meetings and events so I don't miss any of those things. Of course things worked better when I had my Palm, and I'm hoping to get another one at some point, but the calendar on my phone and computer are keeping me going at this juncture.

In both our business and professional lives, there's so much going on that without doing some type of planning, you're going to forget things, miss deadlines, and just plan ol' be stressed out. Planning helps relieve the stress a bit, keeps you and others on track, and helps you get things done. And who could ever complain about that?