Effective Planning Tips and Approaches

It goes without saying that planning and strategy building takes a lot of work! But as you go further down the line and start to take action, it will become clear that it was worth your time.

Here are some approaches and tips to help you plan and strategize your steps for tackling the issues you care about:

• Create an action plan: Take all your goals and objectives and use them to build out a full action plan with a timeline of all the steps and action items that need to be completed. Create checklists or to-do lists and follow your steps for putting your plan into action.
• Backwards planning: As you create your action plan, start with the end goal and work backwards from there. This will help you think about everything that needs to take place, when items should be completed and in what order.
• Get a group together: Coordinate with other like-minded people to reach the goals you’ve planned. Others may also bring some ideas and methods that you’ve not considered before. Every person in your group brings a different set of skills. So have a think about how everyone can use their own skills and experiences to help you reach the end goal.
• Determine what resources you need: Once you’ve created an action plan, think about what resources you’ll need to execute your action items. You may have to develop a plan to access those resources. Update your action plan accordingly.
• Revisit your initial plan and adapt: As you start checking off action items, continually re-evaluate your progress. No plan ever runs smoothly and there may be surprises that you didn’t anticipate. You also may come up with new ideas to add. Adapt and shift action items and goals to make your work more impactful.