Planning

Planning (also called forethought) is the process of thinking about and organizing the activities required to achieve a desired goal. It involves the creation and maintenance of a plan, such as psychological aspects that require conceptual skills. There are even a couple of tests to measure someone’s capability of planning well. As such, planning is a fundamental property of intelligent behavior.

Also, planning has a specific process and is necessary for multiple occupations (particularly in fields such as management, business, etc.). In each field there are different types of plans that help companies achieve efficiency and effectiveness. An important, albeit often ignored aspect of planning, is the relationship it holds to forecasting. Forecasting can be described as predicting what the future will look like, whereas planning predicts what the future should look like for multiple scenarios. Planning combines forecasting with preparation of scenarios and how to react to them. Planning is one of the most important project management and time management techniques. Planning is preparing a sequence of action steps to achieve some specific goal. If a person does it effectively, he can reduce much the necessary time and effort of achieving the goal. A plan is like a map. When following a plan, he can always see how much he have progressed towards his project goal and how far he is from his destination.

Haymarket Media Group

Haymarket Media Group is a privately owned media company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It has publications in the consumer, business and customer sectors, both print and online. It operates exhibitions allied to its own publications, and previously on behalf of organisations such as the BBC. The company has expanded outside the UK in 1999.

History

Haymarket began as Cornmarket Press in the 1950s. Clive Labovitch and Michael Heseltine – later a minister under Margaret Thatcher and Deputy Prime Minister under John Major – who had met at university started out with the 1957 Directory of Opportunities for Graduates and in 1959 relaunched Man About Town, which was to become an influential (if unprofitable) men's consumer magazine. The company failed in its relaunch of the British news weekly Topic, the title closing at the end of 1962, within three months of the takeover. The partners split in 1965, with Heseltine renaming his half of the business Haymarket Press to publish Management Today. The company was renamed Haymarket Publishing and, due to its growing presence in online media and live events, it was rebranded as Haymarket Media Group in 2007. Haymarket has been labouring under heavy borrowings since Michael Heseltine returned from politics to take the helm and buy-back large minority shareholdings from Lindsay Masters and Simon Tindall who managed the business in his absence.

Planning (cognitive)

Cognitive planning is one of the executive functions, it encompases the neurological processes involved in the formulation, evaluation and selection of a sequence of thoughts and actions to achieve a desired goal. Various studies utilizing a combination of neuropsychological, neuropharmacological and functional neuroimaging approaches have suggested there is a positive relationship between impaired planning ability and damage to the frontal lobe.

A specific area within the mid-dorsolateral frontal cortex located in the frontal lobe has been implicated as playing an intrinsic role in both cognitive planning and associated executive traits such as working memory.

Disruption of the neural pathways, via various mechanisms such as traumatic brain injury, or the effects of neurodegenerative diseases between this area of the frontal cortex and the basal ganglia specifically the striatum (cortico-striatal pathway), may disrupt the processes required for normal planning function.