How to Develop Goals: Using an Action Plan Template

There is no single action plan format that defines how you should do it. What I find is that usually the best way to choose one that works for you is to look at a few examples.
When you look at the web, there are thousands of different templates available. Are they all good? I guess most of them are. But most importantly, are they suited to what you needed to do?

A good action plan is usually one that allows you to track your progress and has clear milestones. Here are some elements that I would normally include in mine.

• action to be done
• action assigned to
• target date
• actual completed date
• possible obstacles
• priority

Action to be done is the actual action step to be taken. It can be for example if you are buying a house, saving enough deposit.

Action assigned to is who actually is responsible for the task. It could be you, your partner, a friend, etc. As long as the person is equipped to do it and knows the expectations to what is needed.

Target date is when you would expect the action to be completed. The target date provides a natural checkpoint to see how things are going.
Actual completed date is the date that your action actually completes. Hopefully this is not too far from your target date.

If you are interested in a more detailed way of tracking how you are progressing, we also have what we call an action plan tracker. You can create an action plan tracker by having a space to write down how you progress daily with your action plan.

Sometimes I find that it is very easy for us to set plans but it could be very hard to focus in doing it. So it would be handy to write down actions that we will be doing daily to take us to our goal. If the goal is to join a gym, what can be written as a daily task could be as easy as ringing a few gyms to check on what they offer.

An action plan tracker can help with our focus goals which can be a subset of any action plan item or general goal that we have. In this way, we can track what we achieve in each week. It is good to track our achievements in each week because it can either encourage us with what we have already accomplished or it can also highlight areas that needs more attention.