Planning has always been an integral process when it comes to managing your own business. It basically promotes the creation of a vision and a mission for your organization. Without them, there’s a strong possibility that your financial endeavor shall never become successful for the simple reason that you haven’t created any form of direction.

Begin with the End in Mind

The idea of planning has been further stressed by one of the leading champions in time management and planning, Stephen Covey. In his book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Covey suggests to always begin with the end in mind. It talks about how to set and develop long-term goals not only for yourself but for your employees as well.

In the West, people have become frustrated because of success. They believe that even if they have committed themselves to progress, in the end, they realize that the product doesn’t really provide them with some sense of fulfillment. However, the ultimate reason for such disappointment doesn’t really lie on the fact that they have reached what they consider to be their end. It’s the truth that they haven’t really given themselves a clear vision of what the end is-they haven’t defined the purpose of their organization, especially in the industry that they are in.

Benefits of Planning

It shouldn’t be denied, though, that planning takes a lot of time, as there are certain factors that need to be considered. When you plan, you don’t only have to meet with the board of the directors or the founding members of the company. Most of all, you have to ensure that you have shared your plans to your subordinates through representations of supervisors and managers of various departments.

However, there’s no shortcut to success, and thus, it only means that planning should be accomplished. Here are some of the benefits that you can get when you’re planning:

1. It prevents wasting your time. Every member in an organization exerts effort. Hence, it is only righteous that you should find rewards in all your hard work. When you don’t plan, though, there’s a big tendency that you’ll be performing irrelevant jobs. What’s worse, you tend to develop redundancy with your work. Either way, you have not maximized the use of your time. When you’re not planning thoroughly, you’ll be missing a lot of deadline.

2. You can gather the resources that you definitely need. Resources, such as additional funds to keep your business going, are very critical to the success of your organization. When you fail to plan, you will never be able to discover which resources you lack, and thus, you can never come up with a plan B to cope with emergencies and other contingencies.

3. You have a good idea of what changes you can definitely expect from your organization. A good company always undergoes changes to complement with the ever-changing trends in the field that they are in. Planning, on the other hand, gives you not only a good head start once such changes set in the organization, but all of you can also take the necessary precautions to soften the blow of drastic changes, which may largely alter everyone does their work.

4. It can maximize the existence of an organization. Planning doesn’t only eliminate the wastage of efforts coming from its members but it shall also help in maximizing the time and profits of a business. You can get rid of redundancies in jobs; promote better use of your ecological, human, and financial resources; and you can cut down the time spent in executing all of your plans.

The Pareto Principle

Joseph Juran, an industrial engineer and a philanthropist, popularized the Pareto principle, which is named after an Italian economist named Vilfredo Pareto. It is commonly known today as the 80-20 rule, which means 80 percent of the business profits should come from the clients. You can also associate such concept in planning where 80 percent of the job can be completed only using 20 percent of the time. In an environment where planning isn’t applied, the efforts of members are given 80 percent, yet they can only yield 20 percent of their desired results.

Simplifying Planning with Mobile Productivity

How can you better apply the Pareto principle in your business? You can make use of mobile technologies, such as mobile phones. Indeed, your own cellular phone can be one of your best resources in making sure that you and the rest of your staff can come up with a solid plan that can be easily executed and monitored.

One of the best applications is in the area of mobile extension. When you’re in the stage of planning or even in the process of keeping abreast with the implementations of your plans, you should always be in contact with your subordinates and other members of the organization. However, when majority of you are on the road, it becomes quite difficult for you to do that. Second, everyone doesn’t have much time to remember the long cell phone numbers.

Mobile extension provides a convenient means for all organizational members to be up to date with the plan, its execution, or changes related with it by merely pressing the extension numbers. What the company can do is to choose only one network provider of the company. Each registered user shall be given his own fixed 4-digit extension number that anyone can dial even with the use of their office phone.