Planning | The difference between tactical and strategic planning

There are two types of Planning that come into play when we are thinking about Time Management, Productivity and achieving results.  The first of these is the type of planning that most people are used to seeing talked about, that is Strategic Planning or Goal setting.  Strategic Planning is about long term goals, it is about those thing that we want to achieve.  It is not this type of planning that concerns me here, today I want to look at the other type of planning, Tactical Planning.

Tactical Planning is asking yourself what do I need to do right now, today or even better tomorrow, to move myself closer to my goals. It is one of those things that a lot of us think we do or try to do, but for the most part we fail to do it well enough to make it worthwhile.  Yet it is vital if we want to achieve those goals we have created for ourselves.  This is because you can have all of the great goals in the world, but unless you work at those goals, do something towards achieving them every day, then it becomes more and more difficult every day to get to them.  There are two things that we can do that can really help us to develop better tactical plans and to be able to achieve those plans.

Do it at an appropriate time – Too many of us try to do our planning at a time that is not best suited to achieving solid results. We try to do it first thing in the morning, when everything else is happening and it is very easy for us to to become sidetracked by other things that are going on. Either that or we seek to do it last thing in the day, either just before we leave work or just before we retire for the night.  This time to is difficult often because we want to get home or be finished for the day and it is easy for us to put it off to another time.  The best and most effective time to do your planning is to do it second last thing in the day.  So if you finish at 5.00pm do your planning at 4.00pm.  It makes it easier for you to be able to be as effective as possible with your  planning.

Make a commitment – For most of us planning is an adhoc, something we do when we have the chance, when we remember.  This is why it is usually not as effective as we would like.   To be truly effective we must do our tactical planning regularly, everyday preferably.  The easiest way to ensure we do our planning is to make a commitment to do our planning, we need to plan to plan. The simplest way to achieve this is to go into what ever planning tool you use, be it a diary, outlook or whatever and make an appointment with yourself to do your planning at the same time, as mentioned above, second last, every day.

Priority Management can help by showing you how to plan your day as efficiently and effectively as possible, utilising either a pen and paper system or an electronic tool like Outlook.