How Can Strategic Planning Improve Your Productivity?

Highly productive businesses tend to make more money, and the same goes for productive people. Productivity relies on strategic planning, organization and focused efforts. The best thing about productivity? It can be easily improved.

Planning for productivity improvement is one of the most important assets, for companies as well as for individuals.

‍So, what does “planning for productivity improvement” mean exactly?  It means laying out specific steps you can take to improve your productivity. Creating a daily plan and sticking to it helps you prioritize tasks more effectively, but it also helps you measure your daily productivity levels. Usually, when you start working without a plan you finish your shift slightly unsatisfied with what you’ve accomplished.

To show you why planning is imperative for a productive day, we’ve compiled 3 main reasons why solid planning improves productivity.

Progress Tracking

‍‍If you want to make sure you’re on the right path, you have to track your progress. By having a list of tasks, you’ll be able to see your every achievement in one place. When you see how many things you’ve completed, you’ll get a confidence boost and energy to move to the next task.

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Additionally, you’ll be able to measure your own productivity, and see what you can change to improve. There are also various work time track solutions which will help you track the exact time you spend working on each of your tasks throughout the day. Besides task time tracking, these tools can show you how much time you spent on unproductive activities, so you’ll know if you need to cut down on your social media usage during working hours.

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Time Management

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Anyone who wants to improve their time management skills, needs to work by following a strategic plan. Plans help you organize your schedule, meetings and workload around the most important tasks you have for the day.

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It’s crucial to be aware of how you’re using your own time. Once you realize how much time you spend on organizing, prioritizing, and completing various tasks, you’ll be able to shift around your workload for maximum efficiency.

Without a plan, your schedule will suffer. Tasks will be unfinished, deadlines missed, and meeting forgotten. With a solid list, you’ll be able to schedule everything in a more practical way, and manage your time better.

Personal Satisfaction

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Last, but not least, completing an activity from your list will make you feel accomplished, and by marking tasks done, you’ll get a fresh confidence boost which will help you tackle other assignments. But, you shouldn’t be aiming for perfection, since nothing is ever perfect. 

There’s just so many hours in a day, especially those when you feel like you can work efficiently. Pushing your boundaries further from this limit will make you feel stressed and eventually burnout will sneak up on you.

Strategic plan will push you to move on if you see that you just don’t have what it takes to complete the task right now. You can easily move on to the next one, and come back to the one that was giving you trouble when you feel more confident.

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Wrap Up

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When you sit down to create a strategic plan it means you’ll define all goals which should be met, and what are the steps you need to take to complete them. Plan will help you focus on the most important tasks for the day, and stop wasting time on unproductive activities.

Besides improving productivity, you’ll soon feel more confident and accomplished. And it really doesn’t matter if you’re a lawyer, consultant, a designer or a developer - these steps work for anyone. 

Another thing you can do, especially if you’re trying to teach your employees how to use these tips, is to use an app for employee monitoring, so you can help them track productivity levels and improve.

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This article was originally written on May 3rd, 2016. It was updated on September 20th, 2019.