How to plan...from a speech to the rest of your life...

A Time magazine article "The New Greatest Generation" recently pointed out the US Army's operation order structure works well in many situations. The acronym SMESC or the Sergeant Major Eats Sugar Cookies stands for Situation, Mission, Execution, Support, Command

If you are giving a presentation that lays out an action plan, you can use the same structure. It has 5 parts:

    Situation: What’s the problem?
    Mission: What’s our strategy for solving the problem?
    Execution: What tactics are we going to use?
    Support: What are the logistics? (What people and equipment do we need?)
    Command: What other organizations (teams, suppliers, etc.) have to be involved?

Army Study Guide Operation Order

It's not a stretch to understand that a good outline goes a long way to breaking any task into much more simple tasks. It's also an example of deductive reasoning. Whether one uses the Army method or not the key is breaking down major tasks into digestible small tasks that can be done in minutes, hours, days or weeks instead of being overwhelmed by the whole. This is really the key to success.