Planning for Incremental Success – Introduction

Welcome to the fourth tool in the Approach toolkit – Planning for Incremental Success. This tool is all about structing things so a feeling of constant progress is possible, and understanding the importance of facing in to unknowns to bring certainty…

What is it?

Getting to the root is all about clarifying the why an uncovering the what. Visualisation is all about making your success feel real and building motivation. The art of getting things done is all about building habits that increase your focus and productivity. Now planning for incremental success provides a foundational set of principles and concepts for how you plan your approach to achieving anything.

We all need to have plans in some form or other if we want to achieve anything of great meaning in our lives.

Plans could be for the day, the week, the month, the year, or longer. What they all have in common though is clarity and flexibility. In this tool we will explore the how we can apply a universal set of concepts and principles to our plans to enable us to maximise our productivity and keep moving forwards at all times.

What vs How – What are plans?

It may sound a bit simple, but let’s start of by exploring what plans are.

If you were going to build your own house, you may talk to an architect so they can design your new house and draw up some plans – these are plans for what the final house will look like. You may then engage a building contractor to complete the build works for you, and they will have their plans detailing the order of works to be completed.

So, while we use the same catch all term of plans to define both the description of the outcome we want, and the method or steps we will execute to achieve it, they are fundamentally different things.

Together these two different types of plans, each covering different aspects of the vision and execution, combine together to give the overall plan.

You can have a what and a why without a how, but a how with no what and why is pointless.

So that is why planning for incremental success if the fourth tool in the approach toolkit, the previous tools lay a solid foundation of understanding needed to give furnish your planning.

Planning for incremental is the first in a collection of five tools that focus on how we approach our planning in detail. Think about these tools as a double click on the how section of the getting to the root tool and also the guidance for your prioritisation as part of GTD.

So now, lets get stuck in to the “how” of this tool…

How does it work?

Concepts and Principles

Let’s start by getting comfortable with the concept of having a plan by laying out some boundaries for what function they performs:

A plan is a map giving you a direction of travel – It is not written in stone and can be flexed as you learn more. See all plans are tentative.
A plan is a form of waste – Much like a bridge, once you have reached the other side, it has served its purpose.
Plan in just enough detail to bring clarity around the most important things right now and stop there.
Planning is not getting things done – it is a form of procrastination.
Failing to plan, is planning to fail.

So, plans serve a clear purpose, and they are essential if you want to be efficient and effective at getting things done. But planning something is not doing it, and we all should avoid the trap of focussing too much on the plan rather than the project.

Now we have framed the concept of a plan, lets look at some principles for how we can best structure and sequence our plans to build momentum:

Be bold in your aims, yet realistic.
Have a vision, but avoid planning in detail too far ahead.
Face in to unknowns before complexity.
Chip away at the big challenges every day.
Keep the quick wins stashed for when you need a boost

Building momentum is all about striking a balance between tackling big gnarly tasks that can take weeks to complete and small little jobs that we can get done in less than a day. The key here is learning how to break down those big tasks in to lots of little jobs that we can chip away at daily.

Remember, learning about the unknowns is a key form of progress as it brings certainty to our planning by uncovering the true scale and optimal sequencing of the tasks at hand. Chunk up your research tasks and feather them in to your workload to increase confidence will striving for progress.

There is however another key insight around how our perception of what a goal is, influences our definition of what attainment and as such progress really means…

What’s Next?

Now the foundations have been laid, we are going to progress on to exploring absolute and relative goals in more detail and the gamification of your planning approach…