What is the purpose of writing an energy reduction plan?
For many busy small business owners, writing an energy reduction plan may feel like too much hard work. However, time invested in developing a plan improves your chances of maximising your energy savings and improving your bottom line.
Writing an energy reduction plan has the following benefits:
- It formalises your intentions and helps you to commit to them.
- It breaks down your goals into achievable steps.
- It forces you to set priorities thereby creating a strategy.
- By putting due dates on certain steps, it helps you to stay focused.
- By tracking your progress you are able to keep evolving your plan, using actual data from your business.
- By sharing your plan and reporting on it regularly, it provokes action.
How writing down your goals helps you achieve them
A university study by psychology professor Dr Gail Matthews looked at “how goal achievement in the workplace is influenced by writing goals, committing to goal-directed actions, and accountability for those actions”.[1]
Of five groups, the group that wrote down their goals, made action commitments, and sent regular progress reports to another person, were able to complete an average of 76% of their goals, compared to the 43% success rate for the group who only thought about their goals.