How to use reverse planning to achieve your goals...
It’s a new year, and now’s the time for making a plan for the next 12 months. January is often filled with well-meaning plans and big goals, but by the time spring comes around these have long been forgotten, and we’ve all slipped back into our normal routines.
Unfortunately, this often results in setting the same goals the following January, wondering where you went wrong over the last year. This is where reverse planning comes in handy.
WHAT IS REVERSE PLANNING?
You might be wondering what exactly reverse planning is, and it’s true to its name. In essence, you start with an end goal in mind – let’s say, you want your business to hit a certain financial target by end of year – and then you work backwards to the present day, setting mini milestones and deadlines for along the way, that will help you to reach that original end goal.
It can be really helpful for those goals that you think might be just out of your reach, and that feel too lofty an aspiration. By using reverse planning, you can see a clear path through the uncertainty, which makes the task a lot less daunting.
THE BIG PICTURE
It’s easy to go from one day to the next without a real plan for the coming months or years. While this might feel like a safe option in the moment, it’s not conducive to achieving your long-term goals. Reverse planning forces you to stop and think about the bigger picture in a way that standard planning doesn’t. You need to think about what you want to achieve in the future, as opposed to in the present, in order to effectively implement reverse planning.
Keeping the big picture in mind, and making daily steps – no matter how small – towards your end goal helps you to maintain your appetite for that goal, and it helps to keep your motivation consistent. Plus, the closer you get to your goal, and the more conscious you are of this, the hungrier you’re going to get for it.
NEVER MISS A DEADLINE
A key part of reverse planning is separating your workload into individual chunks. By doing this, you’re automatically making your list feel more manageable, and as a result it will feel more achievable.
This method of organising your workload is also incredibly useful for making sure that you never miss a deadline. Smaller tasks that can easily be ticked off with a day or a week’s work promote better time management, simply because they’re less overwhelming than larger, more abstract to-dos. The planning is – for the most part – already done for you, all you need to do is show up and get the task done.
Big goals require a lot of moving parts to pull off, so ensuring that you hit your mini milestones and intermediary deadlines is crucial.
UTILISE SINGLE ACTIONS
Not every task on your list will be quick to complete, but by utilising single actions – tasks that can be completed speedily, one at a time – you can make a surprising amount of progress in a short amount of time. Implementing these wherever you can will help to maintain your motivation for your goal, and it’ll help you on the days that your tasks seem endless, as you can look back and see how much you’ve completed already.
As well as helping you to chip away at your goal, single actions are also incredibly useful for planning and organisation. Sometimes – even with smaller tasks – it can be hard to know where to start, but if you have a list of the single actions that are required, you’ve instantly got a jumping off point to work with.
Most people use reverse planning every day when deciding when to leave the house in order to make an appointment, when to begin cooking dinner, and on so many other occasions; it’s often an unconscious process. With it being so effective for the smaller, daily tasks, it makes sense that it could also be used in business to achieve professional goals. We have some big plans for next year, and we’ll be using the reverse planning process to help us push forward with not only our own business goals, but also our client projects. Join us in making 2022 the year of reverse planning, and see how much you can accomplish.
If you’re looking discuss what LVE THT can do for your company, we’d love to hear from you! Follow this link to start a conversation today.
