By Paul Duxbury

We often hear the old saying that Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail. Planning is indeed critical if we are to achieve what we truly want in our lives. For me there are a number of stages to creating a Plan:

The Vision

What I quite often refer to as the “Mountain Top View.” Imagine that you are standing on top of a mountain and as you look around you, everything you want in your life is in place. Five years is probably as far as you should look ahead and more often people feel more comfortable thinking about three years in the future. So as you look around you what do you see? Now don’t go putting barriers in the way because remember you have achieved what you wanted to achieve, you have already climbed the mountain! Everything from where you are standing now is what you wanted to be able to see.

For example: In five years time, We will have stopped working in someone else’s business. We will instead be working in our own business, which will be based online. We will be earning sufficient income to maintain our lifestyle living in a wing of a large country house. We will also be earning sufficient income to keep us in the style we want to live long into the future when we move to Spain.

Boulder Avoidance

This is where you look back down the mountain and try to spot the boulders you have overcome on your way to the top of the mountain. What were they? Were there some big boulders and some little ones? Make sure that you have a clear view of the things that tried to stop you getting to the top of the mountain so that when you sit down and work out your objectives over the medium and short term you know what you have got to overcome.

Now to give you an example probably the biggest boulder in our way at the moment is generating the income from our online activities and knowing which of the activities will generate what we need and which will not contribute to what we want to achieve. So here we are starting to think about where we need to focus our activities and are asking questions. Are there online activities which are taking up a large percentage of our time but contributing little to what we want to achieve?

It may be that there are some that you want to continue to take up a large amount of time without them contributing. However, you need to consciously be aware of that rather than bemoaning the fact that you are not achieving what you say you want to. If you are serious about running an online business and want to move full time online your mindset needs to change from “hobby” to “business”.

Now I will turn to the specifics of creating your Plan. The two elements I have mentioned so far are the parts which people normally miss out. However, they are critical if the detailed part of your planning is to have a context and an aim.

Detailed Planning

In terms of the detail of the Plan you create it needs to have a focus on the Vision and be constructed in the Long Term (9 months plus), Medium Term (1 to 3 months) and the Short Term ( the next month).

You need to have a very clear focus on what you want to achieve in those time frames. In order to do that I work with SMART Objectives that are:

Specific – what exactly do I want to achieve?

Measurable – what numbers or other measurable element do I want?

Achievable – is what I am proposing achievable?

Relevant – is what I am proposing to do relevant to enabling me to achieve my Vision?

Time bound – so I will achieve by xx/xx/06

SMART has always worked for me and if you combine it with PDR (Plan, Do and then Review) it’s a surefire way of focusing you on what you need to achieve.

I will finish by simply saying that you should always keep asking yourself “have I done today what I planned to do and has it contributed to achieving my Vision?”

Paul Duxbury is a successful online entrepreneur with many successful websites.  Some of the latest to launch include http://www.fulfilling-your-dreams.com and http://www.sort-your-finances.com

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1 Comment so far

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   Setting goals always helps people achieve things in life. Thanks for the article – nice site!