Action Planning to Achieve Your Goals

                                          

Writing an Action Plan to Help You Achieve Your Goals

A well-designed action plan can make it easier for you to track and realize your goals. Whether you have a career, business or personal goal, you can use this document to create a clear path to success. The level of detail in your action plan can vary based on the resources you have and the complexity of your goal. In this article, we discuss how to make an action plan that can help you reach your goals efficiently and successfully.

                                                  

What is an action plan?

An action plan is a documented layout of the tasks you need to complete in order to accomplish your goal. It breaks down the process of achieving the goal into tasks which can be worked on based on a timeline.
An action plan outlines all the required steps to achieve your goal and helps you reach your target giving it a time to every step in the process.

How to write an action plan 

Setting a goal is relatively easy, but creating a plan to achieve that goal can be challenging. While action plans may differ in terms of tasks and timelines, they generally conform to the same structure and include the same types of information. Create an action plan to help you achieve your goal by following these steps:

1. Identify challenges you may Face while trying to achieve set goals
2. Identify resources which will help you to achieve the Goal
3. Break down the Goal into a list of actions
4. Monitor the progress

1. Goals To Actions: 

A big goal like Running a Marathon or  Earning a Million dollars or Loosing Weight or Achieving a huge Sales Target can be daunting for many. When you are excited and positive, Big goals may seem inspiring but when you are low on enthusiasm ; Which may happen sometimes; you might find these tasks unwieldy to the extent you may give up on them completely. If your big goal is broken down to small tasks which can be done easily, it keeps you on track no matter what the situation is like.

-The big goal of year could be broken into sub goal for next six months
-The six month goal to 3 month goals.
-The 3 month goal could be broken into monthly sub goals

A big Goal like running a marathon within the next 6 months from no running practice at all Could be broken into small achievable tasks tasks or sub goals.
-6 month goal could be broken to a 3 month sub goal:

-Running 14 kms in the next 3 Months

-Monthly goal of Running 9 kms in a month and increasing by 3 kms every month

-For this to happen we may need to break it down to Weekly Goals of planning week for strengthening exercises and Running a particular time or distance daily.

This gives a clarity of daily tasks to be done.

So now rather than worrying about the big task of running 42 kms, all you need to do is focus on daily actionable tasks and slowly and steadily the big tasks will be done.

Every action defined must have a start date and end date.

2. Identify the challenges:

Identifying the challenges which may come up later would certainly help us plan for them in a better way and thus avoid a situation which may force you to give up on your dreams.

There are many challenges that may present themselves. Some may be internal, some external.

Internal challenge may have to do something with your personality trait or with your personal weakness or a habit which ay stop you from doing the tasks.

External could be to factors which may be due to external circumstances not under your control.

For instance  The goal of running Marathon.

Challenges: 

• May not run everyday due to outstation travel or exams.
• Physical weakness
• Weak knees
• Rains and so on.

Knowing the challenges help you plan the Actionable tasks in a proper way ensuring that even in the worst case scenario you have an action plan to keep moving towards your goals. 

3. Identify the Resources:

After identifying the challenges, we also need to know the resources available to us which will help us in the journey towards our goal. What could these resources be. 

Resources could be all the things that will help you positively in the right direction or help you overcome the challenges.

For Instance  The goal of running a Marathon 

Resources:

• Mentoring
• Running Groups
• Online help on running exercises
• Running Coach
• Friends who are interested in Running
• Right equipment(Shoes etc)

Having a list of resources gives you clarity of the tools and help that is needed and available with us to ensure we get the right support when needed.

4 Tracking and Monitoring:

Having a monitoring mechanism to ensure you are on track towards goal is necessary. 

There maybe times when you are off track or you have not been able to do the planned task. It is OK if you miss out sometimes but then you have to monitor and plan for these missing times also.

Visual tools that help you monitor your tasks can be very helpful for this purpose.

Remember 

The action Plan works if you take action.

This is one of the basic ways of Action planning.

In individual plans party Responsible is self most of the times.

There are more advanced ways for organisations and companies. 

Hope this article helps you in achieving your goals and creating an Action Plan.

You can find our ebook on action plan with examples here.

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Ref:https://hr.umich.edu/sites/default/files/rewards-action-plan-examples2015

https://stunningmotivation.com/action-plan-templates/