•  Producing an effective plan can be done in three easy steps. •  Set simple benchmarks and adjust your expectations as necessary.

In a big company, the planning process can be a lot like making sausage: It's not pretty to watch, but the result can be very good. Making a plan can involve a lot of meetings and a lot of head-banging to get the numbers, get the strategy, and finally, the agreement.

You might think that in a company of one, without clashing viewpoints and time-wasting meetings, planning should be easier, right?

Not necessarily, says Stephanie Winston, author of several books on staying organized in the business world. Being a good planner means you must have a methodology for creating your plans. You must be able to set realistic, achievable goals, and above all, you must be able to translate your long-term goals into short-term, day-to-day tasks. But pushing yourself to produce a workable plan may actually be harder than getting consensus out of a big company because you have fewer resources to work with.

The good news is that Winston has a plan for helping you. Her books, Getting Organized and The Organized Executive, have sold more than a million copies. She also publishes a monthly newsletter called The Organized Executive, and her methodologies were featured in last month's Monster.com article Manage Yourself: Organizing a Company of One.

According to Winston, planning is actually three different processes: making and following a daily plan, keeping a calendar, and developing a long-term set of goals.

Becoming a stronger planner, she says, doesn't begin with the big-picture goals. It starts with the everyday tasks.

Short Term: Plan Every Day

You need a daily plan in order to manage your time and to protect it from being taken up or wasted away, Winston says. Your tools will be your calendar and your to-do list.

"I use the Stephanie Winston Two-List Program of Time Management," she says with a smile. "That's just a fancy name for what works for me. One list is the master list. On that list, capture every single thing you have to do -- don't prioritize them, just list them. You can be low tech or high tech, use a Palm Pilot or a plain old yellow pad, but just get them all down. Some of the items may be larger goals. If you're job hunting, you might write down 'Phone 20 contacts this week'. Some of them may be things you can't get to immediately, and you may want to assign to a future date.

"The second list is daily list. This one is much more limited. You should put on it what a human being can reasonably expect to accomplish in a day. If you're working in a large company, that may be four or five tasks because you have only limited control over your time. If you're working in a home office it might be 10 items. Whatever number of tasks you settle on, write them on a specific piece of paper. Perhaps it's a yellow pad that stays on top of your desk, perhaps it's a large Post-it note right in your calendar book."

You derive this daily list by picking the five to 10 items on your master list you hope to accomplish on that particular day, Winston says. Then you work through it during your day, annotating it, crossing things off and going back to add items to your master list as necessary.

You can use the list itself as a visual reminder, or even a reward system.

"I know one woman who writes each of her daily tasks out on small Post-it notes. She puts them all on a clipboard, and when a task is done she throws away the Post-it. She gets the visual incentive of clearing the board."

Managing Your Time

Once you know what tasks you want to accomplish, says Winston, you must make sure you devote your best efforts to the most important tasks. This means taking advantage of your own personal rhythms. For example, you may think of yourself as morning person or a night person.

"Whatever the scientific explanation -- hormonal shifts, energy levels -- it's a real thing. Everyone does have a prime time of day when they're at their best. Whatever yours is, you want to make sure you're working on your prime tasks at that time."

You must be aware of what your prime time is and work to reserve that two or three hours to use for your highest-priority work and build this into your daily list, Winston says.

"People who are visually oriented might think of tasks as colors. The most important or most difficult tasks are yellow or red, the medium ones blue, and the easier ones green. You could color-code your daily list, then sort your list by color and group your code-red tasks into your high-performance time period by marking off that time in your calendar."

Protecting Your Time

It may be harder to protect your time if you're working in an office than if you're working as a company of one, Winston says.

"In an office, people who are tremendously bothered by interruptions often don't understand that these unscheduled interactions are work -- particularly if you manage or are managed by others. The important thing is to manage your influence with these people. Make sure you use these occasions to build relationships as well as accomplish small tasks. Raise your consciousness to the degree to which communication is work. Your body language and tone of voice are important when you're interrupted, because the relationship is important."

Working at home brings a different set of problems, she says. The biggest difficulty is that, to the people at home while you're there, you're not at work. You must protect your prime time against interruptions, which can be especially hard when the offenders are family members. She suggests:

• Set work hours, and when you're interrupted let the offender know they are interrupting.
• Bribe them: Say you'll take them to dinner if they'll let you get your work done.
• Set rules: "When the office door is closed, don't interrupt." On the other hand, because this is family, you have to make sure the office door is open as well. If you're going to make yourself formally unavailable you must make yourself formally available, too. Schedule activities and do things together that create ties.

Medium Term: Use Your Calendar

A calendar serves two purposes for Winston. First, it records commitments -- things that need follow-up and follow-through. "When you say 'I'll call you on Thursday' you put it in your calendar. Then you don't have to depend on your memory. One hallmark of a well-organized system is that little memory is required."

Second, your calendar is the vehicle for planning your immediate future, which is the upcoming week or two, not the long-term goals. "Sit down at beginning of each week, Sunday night or Monday morning, and think of the six or seven tasks you'd like to accomplish that week," Winston says. "Lee Iacocca would do that, I've read. Think of those tasks as boulders in the landscape of your week.

"Those boulders have to be dealt with, whatever else you do during the week. These items should create a sense of an arch to the week. List a reasonable number of achievable tasks, like 'make 20 prospect calls.' Don't overload yourself. Then, in pencil, write down when during the week you intend to do that task. Allocate enough time. Don't constrain yourself.

"Then let those seven tasks be your North Star for navigating your week. Make sure you truly factor them in. Don't brush them off as things come up. It's ok to reschedule them, even move a task into the next week. But they should be your focus, the tasks you work hardest to accomplish."

Long Term: Turn Goals into Tasks

For dealing with long-term goals, Winston puts her two-list methodology to work again as a way of turning the goal into doable tasks.

When you identify a goal, she says, sit down and brainstorm with yourself, "What are all the things I need to do to accomplish this goal?" Write down as many as you can think of remember not to try to prioritize them, just dump them out in a list.

When you think the list is pretty much complete, organize it, but not in priority order from first to last or most important to least important. Instead, think of it in layers that sort the tasks out by how they organize themselves in terms of time, Winston says. It breaks down like this:

• Layer One tasks are what you need to do to get started. You might need to do some research, to subscribe to publications, or you might even need to set up your office.
• Layer Two tasks are things you can do once the Layer One tasks have made them possible. Make phone calls once you've got your contact list built or update your resume once your new printer is installed.

Meeting Your Goals

Winston has some tips for helping you meet your goals:

• Perhaps the most important is to be reasonable in your expectations of what you can accomplish. "Don't overburden yourself. Don't load yourself up and then feel guilty when you don't do everything."
• Even though you may be working along, don't try to do it all by yourself. "Your job is not to be a martyr, it's to get the job done. Delegate if you can, farm out or barter whatever tasks you can."
• Play to your own strengths. If you're a very focused person, then set up your daily list with fewer tasks you can devote longer periods of time to. If you're a natural multi-tasker, then break your tasks down further and assign yourself more of them. Be conscious of your own rhythms and don't set expectations for yourself that work against those tendencies.

How do you know you're on the right track? You have to check back with yourself periodically, Winston says. "Set simple benchmarks. In two weeks, thus and such should have happened; in a month here's where I should be. Write them into your calendar, and if you find you're not reaching them, sit down and ask yourself why.

"Do this every couple of weeks or at least every month. Sit down and analyze what went well and what didn't as a prelude to making it work better. You may need to adjust your expectations of how much you can do. You may discover you missed some Layer One tasks. You need to have a scheduled session with yourself. Especially if you're the only resource you've got, you need to make sure you're using your resource wisely."