Creating a Game Plan of Success...

In my two previous articles I explained why we all seem to have a problem with not having enough time as well as if we just change the way we look at time and what we want to achieve within that time (our outcome or result), how we can save so much and in fact have more time than we ever imagined.

In this article I will explain how we can plan our strategy to get our outcome / result and a powerful tool called “chunking” which when used properly can make any daunting task possible.


So now we know what we want, we know why we want it, now what? Well now comes the exciting part of making our vision into reality, creating a strategy that makes it all possible (A game plan). A game plan is nothing but all the items that we would critically need to do in order to get our outcome / results achieved and the sequence of how they should be done. Though this sounds so simple this is where we define how much effort we need to put, in order to get to our results. Spending this up front time helps tremendously in the actual execution of your plan. 

To make this simple let me explain how I would create my game plan.

• First I would take a piece of paper (or even a worksheet) and write down my outcome or result and my reason for wanting that outcome in big bold letters.
• Then I would close my eyes, get really relaxed and put myself on a peak state (for me this would be listening to some great motivational music like the songs from Rocky and believing I am Rocky in a fight going against all odds).
• Then I would just write down all the things that would come to my mind that I feel I would need to do in order to achieve my result. I have no order, priority or importance.
• Once I am convinced that I have put all I can think of, I usually end up with a huge list of items. Now if I try to plan how to get these done things will look very daunting indeed. So I  try to group thing which relate to one another. This is called “Chunking”. By this we can make sure that can reduce our laundry list to a manageable set of items. Also note that chunking is an art and not a science, so there is no right and wrong of doing this, each person has their own way and with experience we get better. Chunk too much then you have a very big task, chunk too little you will have so many little tasks that you will lose count.
• When I am chunking 99% of  the time I clear out items which I know I do not need to focus on. What is remaining will be very few items. Then I mark their priority in terms of importance. So the items that MUST be done will be the highest priority and item that are “good get done” would get a very low priority.
• Next I would see what are the items that I can offload to someone else. This means what are the items that I can get someones help with. This is a tremendous asset most of us do not use, because we tend not to see who we can enlist to help till we have the task in front of us.
• Then finally I would put down when I would need to / want to finish each of these items. Which should include at least one item that I need to do immediately. I do this to create the sequence of how the tasks must be done and the immediate task is to get the momentum immediately towards my result because I strongly believe when something is in motion it tends to stay in motion.

Now I have my action plan to get my outcome done. I have what I need to do, what are the most important items that I need to focus on , who I can enlist the help of and when I would need to finish each task. So now I am set to achieve my task right??? Well NOOOO. There is one more thing that if we want to plan to succeed, I need to do. I need to plan for FAILURE.

What, you may ask is planning for FAILURE, well one last thing that I would do is for each of these tasks I would try to think of at least (minimum) 3 things that could impede the completion, Because when I know what can go wrong, I can now itself plan for that. Then I know if by chance that particular roadblock happens I will be able to deal with that in advance.

Well there you have it. This is how I plan my game plan. At the end of the planning process I would have a document with below.

• What my outcome / result is and why I need to achieve that
• What are the common set of items that I would need to focus on and their importance
• Who I can leverage my tasks to
• When do I need to complete my tasks

What would be the roadblocks that I foresee that could impact me completing my task and the ways of overcoming them.

Following is an example of an actual game plan (Action Plan)  where I had to plan a presentation which I was notified three days prior. Once you read the story you will know how I got the presentation done and not only that but make it one of the best workshops/ presentations I had ever done.

It all happened when I was waiting for a haircut about 2 years back. I suddenly got a call from one of my friends and he informed that they have just started a new project in doing free presentation / seminar for people in the IT field, the problem he was having was their presenter who was supposed to do the presentation in three days time has had an urgent official business trip to take, hence he was not able to make the presentation, their backup presenter was also not available. His request was can I do some presentation because since they just started they were in no way to postpone the workshop.

Well the first thing that came to my mind was “COULDN'T YOU HAVE CALLED A BIT EARLIER ……..”. But I said “yes” as doing presentation / seminar and giving speeches to share my knowledge was something that I just loved to do. Once I said “yes” he thanked me lot and asked me to prepare and send a brief note of what would be the topic that I would be talking about as their would be about 200 odd people from IT sector. Well after I put down the phone and thought about my topic only it hit me that I didn't have a topic planned yet and my brain went to panic mode. So I told my brain to stop thinking about that for now and first have a hair cut.

Once I went home that day, I started creating a game plan and the steps below is what I did.

• Got a graph paper
• List down what is my outcome in doing this presentation right on top
• List down why I would want to do this presentation just under the outcome
• Identify all the activities that I would need to do, things I need to have to get my outcome met in one column
• Grouped the activities which are similar (chunking)
• Identified the major activities and the minor activities
• Plan the activities so that I know when each item needs to be completed
• See which activities I can get the help from others and who they are
• For each  major activity try to identify at least three things that could go wrong and list down how I can overcome them, work around them.
• Envisioned how I would feel at the end of the presentation

The above took about 2 hours for me to do, but that 2 hours helped me to plan out my presentation to be one of the best presentations I have done and after the presentation when I met some of the participants, they were really thrilled with the presentation and even when I meet some of these people they come and thank me for sharing my knowledge with them.

Game Plan for presentation

So there you have it, how to create a working plan to get your outcome reached. Note that if you have a outcome, then that i just a dream, if you list down why you want this outcome then it becomes a possibility but the moment you put down an action plan it becomes reality.

In my next article I will show you how to utilize what we have learnt so far to manage our time and live our life to the fullest. Till then "Live Your Best Life Ever"