No matter who you are or what position you work in, planning is crucial for completing any task and keeping your life balanced. So, how can we improve this essential work-planning skill? Please refer to G.A.P Institute in the article below!
1. What are planning skills?
Planning skill is a person's ability to build desired goals, establish strategies, methods, and processes and directly implement them to realize that goal within a specific timeline. Employees will use their planning abilities to ensure they always complete their work on time and to a high standard. Planning and organizing skills help run a business smoothly and encourage subordinates to work more productively.
In general, work planning skills will be demonstrated through the following abilities:
- Know clearly defined goals and expected completion time
- Devise a strategy to realize goals
- Arrange and execute actions in a particular order to achieve goals on time.
2. Benefits of improving work planning skills
Practicing proper planning skills makes it easy to increase productivity in the workplace and allows you to support your team in meeting deadlines to achieve common goals. Specifically, it brings benefits such as:
- Helps you prioritize tasks: This lets you identify which tasks should be done first based on priority level. Accordingly, you are guaranteed to complete your biggest goals while taking advantage of daily tasks.
- Easily track and check work progress: Important tasks and goals will always be placed in the general progress table, making it easy to visualize and track throughout the work process.
- Proactively develop yourself: Planning specific tasks helps you quickly review your strengths and weaknesses. In addition, you can also control yourself and plan your studies by knowing what you need to do shortly.
- Be motivated to accomplish many other goals that have been set: Building a specific goal and gradually realizing it will make you more excited and energetic. Because you only need to complete the small tasks in the primary plan to get closer to your goal daily.
3. How to plan work effectively
- Step 1: Determine work goals
To create an effective work plan, you need to determine the main goal you want to achieve. This includes predicting the results you want to achieve, when they will be completed, and the consequences if the goals are not fulfilled. Accordingly, the goals of the plan that need to be met by applying the SMART model include the following:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Actionable
- Relevant: Suitable for long-term purposes and solving existing problems
- Time-bound: Time limit for achieving the goal
- Step 2: Plan by day/week/month/year
Once you have your goals, you should create a plan for both short-term and long-term milestones.
This helps you specify detailed tasks and distribute completion time into small milestones. Along with that, you can also easily see what you need to do. List the tasks you must complete according to the start and end time frames.
- Step 3: Classify tasks in order of priority
After you have a list of tasks to do and the time to complete them, you need to divide them into four types of functions in the plan, including:
- Important and urgent work
- Important work but not urgent
- The work is not necessary but urgent
- The work is not required and not urgent
To allocate them appropriately, you need to clearly understand the nature of each job and divide human resources properly. In particular, leaders not only have to grasp the number of employees but also need to understand the characteristics of each individual and each department. Thus, the work will be implemented effectively and economically with the right people and time.
- Step 4: Focus on implementing the plan
Any work, even in the "not important and not urgent" group, needs you to take it seriously, eliminate distractions and meet the set deadline. However, being flexible in implementing work plans is also quite important. Because competitors and the market will continuously change and develop, you need to have plans to plan and not learn to grow.
Also, remember to monitor and support employees daily to understand work progress. Are they following the plan, and are there any shortcomings? Listen and evaluate human resource capacity to easily adjust plans. That way, you can easily handle problems that arise and complete the job on time.
Tomorrow's success will lie in today's preparation. With this article, G.A.P Institute has shared steps to improve your planning and work organization skills with you. Please design and organize your own short-term and long-term plans for work!
In addition, G.A.P Institute always accompanies businesses in building and implementing practical training and development strategies to help retain talent. Please get in touch with us immediately for further advice!
