How not to Plan: 66 ways to screw it up

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In being honest about how our days went and how we’re faring on our big goals, we can fine-tune our daily planning for better results. Hectic days might mean we need to prioritize more effectively or find a way to delegate work. Missing daily planning sessions might mean they’re too long and could benefit from a more streamlined approach. If we’re not moving towards our goals, it may mean we have too many or we’re not adding them to our days with enough frequency or intention. We might simply like pen and paper while we’ve forced ourselves to try a shiny new app. Whatever the issue, work to resolve it by modifying your daily planning process. James Clear, the best-selling author of Atomic Habits, thinks motivation is overrated: “Stop waiting for motivation or inspiration to strike you and set a schedule for your habits”. Motivation flows from action, not the other way around. Making a habit of your daily planning is one thing. Ensuring that your plan is actually inching you towards your bigger goals is another. Use your daily planning session to make sure your daily tasks are aligned with your long-term objectives. Here are a few steps to get you there: Step one: Break down your big goals Surprisingly, our brand’s marketing team hadn’t noticed. They were so focused on their immediate rival they failed to spot the little brands stealing their customers; the other brand probably suffered from the same blinkered view. At the tactical level, troops were sent to Norway poorly trained, inadequately equipped and without proper support, and in administrative chaos reminiscent of the Crimea. The result was predictable. A French officer in Norway commented, `the British have planned this campaign on the lines of a punitive expedition against the Zulus, but unhappily we and the British are in the position of the Zulus`.

This article was co-authored by Jennifer Clark. Jennifer Clark is an Evolution Coach and the Founder of Soulful Solutions, her life consulting business which helps both individuals and organizations evolve and grow into their full potential based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. She has over 20 years of experience assisting over 8000 individuals with life consulting, workshop facilitation, and public speaking training. She received a Risk Management Certification from the Sprott School of Business in 2000, an Integrated Energy Therapy Master and Instruction Certificate in 2004, and an Assertiveness Coach Certificate in 2015. She earned a BA with Honors in Political Science from Queen's University in 1992. But as Andrew Ehrenberg and Byron Sharp have shown, markets are much less segmented than people think. We all use a repertoire of brands – Waitrose shoppers pop into Lidl too – so all category brands compete with one another to some extent. It’s not uncommon to need to experiment and try a few iterations of daily planning before we land on the method that actually lead to getting more done.

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A productivity method is both an effective way to get things done and a strategy for planning your day. The Pomodoro Technique is best for people who enjoy working in short focused sprints with frequent breaks. This method was developed in the late 1980s by Francesco Cirillo, then a struggling student, who committed to just 10 minutes of focused study using a tomato (pomodoro in Italian) shaped kitchen timer. This method includes the following steps:

oThe threat from competitors is largely a matter of size. Your biggest competitors will be the biggest brands in the market. Even if you think they’re in a different segment. K tym mucham. Autori az prilis casto a prilis intenzivne zlahcuju ulohu a vyznam digitalnych kanalov v komunikacii. V podstate sa neustale vyhranuju voci marketerom, ktori (prehnane) evanjelizuju digitalny marketing. Ono by to nevadilo, pretoze sa da s nimi suhlasit, len je toho v knihe proste privela. Dalsia vec je prilis casta nekonkretnost v odporucaniach a velakrat aj absencia podpory ich trvdeni konkretnymi datami. All based on empirical knowledge and hard-earned experience, rather than wishful thinking, received wisdom or guesswork. HOW NOT TO MAKE A PLAN

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That’s why having a daily planning ritual is so important. Some mornings we feel motivated to seize the day and create a to-do list that reflects our big ambitions. But those days are the exception. We need to get things done even when we wake up tired and disengaged, wanting to return to bed or longing for Friday at 5 PM. Those are the days it’s most important to approach the day with a plan. Many of us start our mornings with dozens of things we need to get done, only to realize at the end of the day we haven’t crossed any of them off. It’s amazing how often clients happily commit huge sums of money with no clear objectives. Even when objectives are specified, they’re often incredibly vague. One company recently spent millions of pounds without defining their objectives any more clearly than to ‘sell a shedload of X’. A London Business School survey showed that company boards regard loyalty as the single most important measure of brand health. Data from the IPA Databank suggests that campaigns with brand loyalty objectives outnumber those with a penetration objective by 2:1. Chasing loyalty seems embedded in marketing orthodoxy – its merit beyond question.

First, a focus on efficiency, not on effectiveness. Big brands with high market share find it hard to increase revenue. So they focus on cost cutting. Our brand was just focused on short-term ROI. Its competitor had the same obsession. But cutting their budgets destroyed the foundations of their success. Everything in our professional world moves so fast that we might now hesitate to publish an authoritative volume on the craft and practice of planning for fear of speedy obsolescence. But despite changing circumstances, there are eternal principles and rules, and ways of approaching problems that remain helpful – and we’re keen to uphold them. We think they will continue to guide planners, strategists, marketers and researchers for many years to come. And it is these principles and ideas that Les and Sarah have used to create this incisive ‘How To’, or rather, ‘How Not To’. oThink people, not just numbers. Who do you need to influence? What do you want them to do, exactly? Instead of what? Find the productivity method that works best for you by taking our Productivity Methods Quiz to better understand your unique style of working. Choose your planning toolTo be honest, we’re not big fans of ‘business books’. Like you, no doubt, we have shelves full of them. Most we’ve not finished. Many we’ve not even started. None are actually used. In this first chapter, we look at how to get off to the right start; how to set sensible objectives; how to think through what your communication can do; and how it might realistically do this. How Not To Plan is the book I wish I’d had when I started out as a planner. Admittedly life was somewhat simpler then: Just the 4 main media for a start, a lot of quite good quality research to lean on, a far less complicated marketing world to operate in, and by extension a far more limited set of tasks for the aspiring strategist. The demands on today's planners and strategists are infinitely greater and the world is fabulously complex by comparison. And we are all continuously assailed by competing and often entirely fallacious theories about how marketing and advertising work. How to navigate this world effectively?

Use a to-do list app like Todoist to set a recurring task to plan your day, or simply set an alarm on your phone. We thought we might run to a couple of years’ worth of articles. Six years later, we were still going strong… The 2016 John Lewis IPA case is a good example of how to set objectives. John Lewis’s ultimate aim is to keep its ‘Partners’ (permanent employees) happy. The paper shows how this informed the company’s plan, from business/commercial objectives through marketing objectives to communications goals. The KPIs by which success would be measured then flowed from the plan.We’ve designed the book with practicalityin mind. You should be able to shove it in your bag and take it to a meeting, scrawl in your own ideas, make notes in it, and enjoy having it next to you on your desk. All very ambitious. But nowhere in the rest of the brief was there anything about how to achieve these heady objectives. No radical new positioning. No new audience or usage occasion identified. No new channel thinking. And no increase in budget. In short, a total disconnect existed between objectives and plans – or more accurately, between marketing fantasy and reality.