Simple trick to increase personal and business productivity: using prediction instead of planning

Most people regularly experience stress from their schedules that were not implemented. Why there are differences between plans and implementations? Mostly because of drawbacks in planning procedure: actually, plans in most cases describe that things which we want to happen but ignore things which are likely or possibly to happen even against our will.

Now I want to share some simple but extremely effective time management technique that helps to make plans much closer to reality.

Actually, this technique is very simple: instead of planning try to focus on predicting. Simple, huh?

And now some explanations to show how this works. When someone tries to predict, s/he involves in the process much more factors than doing just planning. And it helps dramatically.

For example, you can plan for tomorrow to make some appointments and to complete some tasks. When you just plan, in most cases you try only to estimate how much time task or appointment requires and to find enough available time to it. But when you start predicting instead of planning, you will try to look at your tasks and appointments from some different point of view. First of all, you will try to identify factors which could interfere with your plans and decide how plans could be affected. Secondly, you could recall similar situations from your memory and assume how your past experience about your own or other's people actions could affect them. Finally, you will try to make more reasonable estimations and consider multiple situations in case if something goes wrong.

Let's review some practical example.

In the table below we can see some typical morning schedule prepared using standard planning approach.

But what's wrong with it? The point is that this schedule looks too sleek to be real - in real life similar schedules involving many people never goes in that way that was planned. If something goes wrong the whole plan may became faulty. In this case very important appointment with a client may cause serious troubles if not enough preparations was made.

Let's try to make some prediction to the schedule and add comments.

Modified schedule using planning approach based on prediction is shown in the table below.

As you can see, we received much more reasonable schedule which takes into account possible deviations caused by typical time-consuming situations. Also this schedule is flexible and focused on productivity marking out most important tasks and is much more "stress-proof" than traditional one.

In the end, I want to add that the example shows only little part of possibilities of this approach. You can not only predict possible time deviations in schedule but to do some preventive actions to avoid them. Also you can create branched schedules based on "What...If" analysis like flow chart in computer programming. Moreover, this technique is very effective on time prolonged periods such as long lasting projects.