Effective planning involves setting SMART goals, exploring options to achieve those goals, creating a detailed plan with milestones and activities, evaluating the plan for risks, getting stakeholder buy-in, implementing the plan, tracking progress, and closing out the plan by documenting lessons learned. The key steps in planning are to gather information, set goals, create the plan, evaluate it, gain approval from stakeholders, implement the plan as intended, monitor it, and conclude by assessing what succeeded and failed. Planning should aim to minimize risks and accommodate changes while keeping the process simple, long-term focused, and with dependencies and contingencies considered.