Planning and preparing, setting priorities, distinguishing what is urgent from what is important are fundamental steps to achieve our goals in personal and professional life. We see this every day, in the way we work, organize family life or the time we set aside for ourselves.

Without planning, it is possible that we can achieve our goals, but the odds are lower, and the path to get there is much harder, inefficient and troubled.

If planning proves to be extremely important at the individual level, at the level of organizations and companies it is vital. Therefore, it is not an exaggeration to say, as is my conviction, that in a company, planning is the basis of everything.

Personally, I have my professional life and that of Living Tours, always planned for at least 2 years, with all the events I intend to attend, congresses and conferences to be present, fairs and workshops to participate, as well as other defined goals and targets, planned to be fulfilled, which almost always happens.

It's hard to think of any kind of sustainable and consistent business results over time without adopting these very solid planning habits that I believe are the foundation of business success.

As we know, a company's results are measured in terms of three fundamental points: sales, profit and cash flow.

But these three points depend on the company's ability to be consistent and depend on three disciplines that must be practiced to exhaustion:

1 - Priority setting: Distinguishing what is central from what is secondary, and establishing what must be done first and what, being important, we can leave for later.

2 - Ability to generate information and decide based on this information: decisions must be made rationally and based on solid information. This does not mean that intuitive decisions cannot be good either, but it is important to always cross them with an informative, well-founded base that gives them congruence.

3 - Ability to implement a pace: Because it's not enough to go in the right way, you have to do it at the right speed.

In practice, these three disciplines translate into the ability to plan: Because planning is setting priorities, planning involves focusing on certain indicators and measuring them, planning is establishing a schedule to execute what we propose, that is, predicting a certain pace.

Planning is the system that allows all these pieces to fit together, enabling everything else to happen and guaranteeing the traction we aspire to for the business.

The pressure of planning is a positive pressure, because it keeps us framed and aligned, because it helps and guides us, but not everyone is willing to be accountable to themselves