Taking less than 1% of your day to plan the other 99% will yield much more than 5 minutes in return. The many benefits of a written plan include the ability to recover faster from interruptions, to control events instead of events controlling you, to weigh daily opportunities against your plan so you can make better decisions and to save the time lost transitioning between tasks. The excuse I hear most often for not planning is “I don’t have time,” but really it’s time you lose when you don’t have a plan.