Creating a Life Plan: How to Do a Daily Life Plan - 5 Top Tips

When creating a life plan, many people get so stuck in looking at the "Big Picture" that they forget about the instrumental daily steps that change their overall trajectory of life. This article gives you five tips for altering your trajectory daily, so you can accomplish your big picture dreams, as well as gives you free access to a personal development - life plan workbook, so you know how to realistically set up your dreams so you can achieve them. Tip #1: Create a personal development plan using a good personal development plan template or sample which helps you create a realistic "big picture of your bearings in life." It should also help you dig deep into your own internal knowledge of where you want to take your life and how to get there. Tip #2: When creating a life plan, it is important to think of it in daily segments. So, each night before you go to bed, make a list for the following day. Include EVERYTHING, including brushing your teeth, and then take off half of the list (but not the brushing of the teeth, please.) While this may sound silly, if you can get into the habit of creating a list that is doable and accomplishing things on it, even if it's having breakfast, brushing your teeth and checking those things off, you will create the habit of making a list that gets DONE, rather than having a list that is overwhelming and left UN-done at the end of the day. By doing this exercise, it programs your subconscious that you are successfully accomplishing things every day, as well as factoring in the time it takes to eat breakfast, brush your teeth, etc. Tip #3: Keep your focus. Instead of allowing yourself to get distracted and reverting to your "I'm not getting anything done mode," catch yourself becoming distracted, stop yourself in your tracks and say, "I'm focused and motivated." This one step alone will alter your trajectory for your daily life plan because you just "changed your course" from drifting down the river of distraction to speeding up the river of focus. Tip #4: Your life plan should include a day-to-day "activities calendar" for a week or a month at a time. Print out a paper calendar and pencil in your goals for the next week or month on a day-to-day basis. This has an amazing effect on how much you can accomplish. Be sure to apply the technique in Tip 2 above and give yourself twice the amount of time to get things done. By creating a life plan in a tangible, daily calendar format, you'll be surprised at how much free time you have because you've planned everything out and are "on track," versus always going in high gear and never acknowledging your accomplishments. Tip #5: Trust yourself that you are making progress on a day-to-day basis and that with each day's experience, you are a different person from the prior day or week. Remember that when a missile changes course, a small change in bearing at the beginning has a huge effect as the missile projects along its new path. The same goes for you. As you make small, incremental changes in the beginning, those changes will have a larger impact as you progress down the new path that awaits you now that you have taken those changes. Remember when creating a life plan, include a good personal development plan and then use it to do your daily life plan. In fact, if you can look at your life plan as "one step in front of the other" and step by step you are changing the course of your outcome, you will change your overall trajectory so that in a week, a month or a year from now, you will have accomplished much more than you would have if you had not gone "slowly, but surely" in a calculated and focused fashion.