2007-10-20

The benefit of planning

The problem: A lot to do and no time.
Sometimes we wonder how people could survive in former times. They had to do a lot manually and a lot of things were nearly not automated. In our life everything gets faster and more complex as well. And sometimes we either do not know how it happened that we finished under this big amount of things need to be done.

The reason: Competition
With the intention to be competitive companies are optimizing in the way that staff is reduced and the remaining people have to complete more tasks. Again to be more competitive companies want to improve quality and increase the amount of provided services. Because of the costs no company wants to have their machines (and employees) standing still and therefore are very carefully in hiring new workers.

The solution: Efficient time planning
Everybody has the same amount of time available. This is bad because it means that you cannot gain more time than others. But it is also good because others cannot gain more time than you. The important thing is what you make out of your time. This means that the key is the efficient use of your time. It is necessary to make decisions - when there is not enough time for everything to be done that you desire to do then some goals have to be dropped for the favour of others.

The very most important thing is: Whatever you want to do - put it on your calender (with the estimated duration). If you don't schedule a day where you will actually do the task then when will you do it? Because of this I dropped my To-Do-Lists. I have a calendar. Everything I want to do is scheduled. If it is not scheduled it is not enough important. When priorities change I might change my scheduled tasks but I am always aware of the time limits because I see the days and every task has a duration and so occupies more or less hours of the day.

When I put a task on the To-Do-List I was used to write a short description but I did think only few about the duration and even less about the actual day or week when I will do it. So it happened that I thought of ideas I later discovered that there will never be time for it.

When working with a calendar you have to think about the actual time when to do it and the duration. When thinking about the time budget necessary it means that you think about the required effort and costs. While you are thinking about this you are analysing the task or project and here you are in the middle of the planning. Analysis is an important part in every project because it is very important to find out even the value, benefit and priority of the project.

When there are new projects or new ideas companies need more workers and even for doing there in-the-line-tasks they need a specific amount of workers to get out the results in a sufficient quality. So doing more with less resources is mostly not really true. Sometimes the resources change (like doing things with a computer which was previously done by humans) but resource is resource. So companies can decide whether to offer an additional service or product or not and what resources to use. Managing resources to have them fit at the time when actually needed and managing projects to have everything ready when needed is a lot of planning work. But the benefit of planning is the same as the benefit of thinking before doing.

Without planning you run risks to
  • Don't have the required resources ready when needed
  • easily get stress because of "unexpected" occurrences
  • find out too late that the time for a task or project is not sufficient
  • ...
Related post: Analysis and therapy.

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