Behaviors That Harm Your Success Series-How to Stop Planning and Start Acting

How to Stop Planning and Start Acting 

Planners like to plan. It brings them comfort and helps them feel they are in control. Yet, the best-laid plans are not worth much if you never act. If you like to plan but hesitate to execute, your chances of reaching success are limited. Sure, you may finally reach your goal - someday - but you will get there faster if you stop planning and start doing.

5 Steps Act on Your Plans

Getting stuck in the planning rut is not fun nor productive. The reasons you may do this range from fear to perfectionism. Are you ready to stop the merry-go-round of endless planning futility and make your dreams a reality? Use these steps to move from plan to action: 

1. Look at how you spend your time. If you are in the midst of planning a project, pay attention to how long you have spent preparing it. Has it been a few hours? Days? Weeks? Months? Once you know where you are spending time, you can begin the process of switching from planning to action.
2. Monitor what you consume. You need to stop consuming content at some point and start doing. It's easy to get lost down Internet rabbit holes in your research and planning. You can alleviate any time-wasting by being intentional about what you are looking for and setting a time limit on how long you will spend doing it.
3. Accept that no plan will ever be perfect. Waiting to develop the ideal plan will leave you waiting for a very long time. Plan to the best of your abilities and then leap into implementation. Treat your plan as a roadmap to refer to, not a commandment set in stone from which you can never deviate.
4. Break big projects down to bite-sized steps. Sometimes, your plans may seem more like mountains to be scaled. That can be terrifying and stop you from taking the next step. It's okay to take a little time and break a more extensive project into smaller steps that you can handle easily.
5. Just start. This may be the hardest step to take, but you need to at some point. When all else is done, and you have no more excuses, act. Look for what you can do in the next five minutes and do it. You will feel better, and you might feel the momentum build to take another and another. Now, you're on your way to achieving goals and reaching success!
   
   Remember, it's okay to step out from behind the plans and implement them. You will gain so much more confidence when you do.