‘Achieve Your Dreams By Keeping a Planner!’

Seo Jin, a 34-year-old resident of Paju, Gyeonggi Province, has kept a planner over the past five years.

He said he feels he wasted his 20s so now he is keeping a planner. When Seo turned 30, he felt gloomy and thought he should write books over and over again.

Brooding over why he failed to achieve his goal, he realized his habit of thinking without acting was behind his failure.

“The habit of failure embedded in me was thinking in my head,” he said.

When he realized keeping his ideas in his head instead of implementing them was a recipe for failure, he began to keep a planner.

Seo set goals and wrote them on the front page of the planner. He split a year into quarters and wrote a to-do list every three months.

He eventually achieved his monthly goals as a result.

Seo is the owner of Reader and Reader, a publishing company releasing self-help books.

“I cannot imagine myself without a planner. If you plan every day to achieve one goal, however small it might be, you will find yourself heading toward your dream,” he said.

Seo created the Internet club “Gathering of Franklin Planner Users (cafe.daum.net/fpuser)” in 2003 and shares his know-how on time management and self-development with 73,000 members.

People often want and feel they must do something, but often procrastinate because they lack specific plans. The strategy is to split their goals into stages and add time to each stage.

Lee Gyeong-jae, the head of the Korea Achievement Enhancement Center, stresses the importance of planning, saying “Planning is half the battle.”

Once a goal is set, write down specific action plans for each month.

Many planners have pages for monthly goals. Once a monthly plan is set, setting a weekly plan is easy. One or two goals are appropriate for monthly and weekly plans.

When planning for a day, one should write today’s list based on what comes to mind. Priority should go to important things and they should be categorized into A, B and C.

For example, A is a must for today, B needs to be implemented soon, and C is something to be done if possible.

When deciding to carry out the tasks, mark them with a check. Using other symbols such as “→ (postpone),” “X (cancel)” and “○ (in progress)” is also helpful.

One should also be careful not to write too many things on the to-do list out of eagerness. The idea is that 60 percent of the hours one believes is available can be used.

“I was bad at organizing and had no sense of direction of life, but after keeping a planner, I changed,” said Han Geun-soo, a computer programmer-turned-lecturer in leadership. “I kicked the habit of sticking to small things instead of looking at the big picture after writing goals in my planner and implementing them.”

Lee said, “A planner is a time management tool that helps achieve goals. When I leaf through my planner, I can look back on what I did as a parent and a son and how much time I used the past week.”

nuk@donga.com