How To Plan Out Big Projects?

Whether it's for work or home, life is full of large goals and big projects.  It's easy to procrastinate instead of coming up with a plan, but a plan is the only way you're ever going to finish and finish well.  What we want to look at is a basic strategy for creating this plan.

1. Make a Goal Task List

Your goal might be on your every expanding todo list, but it's really too big a task to mean anything.  Make a list of all the steps that must be accomplished in order to say you have actually completed your goal.

2. Prioritize

Some tasks just have to be completed before other tasks.  You can't use supplies before you go to the store to buy them.  You can't write a report on a book before you read it.  Put your list in the order you believe it needs to be done.  It may be easiest to start at the end and ask the question, "What's stopping me from doing this?"

3. Set Deadlines

First, establish a completion date for the project or goal.  If it's for work (or school), this may already be done for you.  If it's more personal, there may be factors that make a certain time of year more desirable than another, such as costs or activities.

Next, establish deadlines for each of your tasks by estimating how much time you will need to complete them.  This step is best done with a calendar or day planner handy.  While some items will have dates or set amounts of time related to them, other tasks will not be so clear.  Make an educated guess somewhere between the maximum you can give and the minimum you must give .  If you find lots of extra time, you can always go back and be more generous with some of the deadlines.

4.  Make a Daily List

You have five days to read a book, how many pages do you read each day?  You have two weeks to pack before you move, what do you pack each day?  Break the items on your goal task list into smaller tasks that can be accomplished in one day.  How are you going to finish the next task on the list by its deadline?  Here's where you want to think about what you can do to make progress every day.  These will help set your priorities for the days between now and finishing your project.

5. Place Your Goal Task List Somewhere Visible

One of the pitfalls of long-term projects and goals is the tendency to think there is plenty of time.  Another problem is forgetting there's something to work on at all.  By putting your list where you will easily see it all the time, you will help yourself avoid these issues.  Every day, it will serve as a reminder to pull out your daily list and make some progress.
Life is about more than making it through another day.  We all want to progress beyond where we are now, but nothing worth achieving can be started and finished in one day.  To see improvement, to accomplish great things, we must purposefully do little things every day that will someday add up to the great things we hope to achieve.  So all great things are started when we break them down into a daily plan and begin to face the challenges one day at a time.