A useful way of planning your tasks as a team is to use an "Urgent and Important Matrix". This is a particularly good tool to use at the beginning of a project as you are able to identify the tasks at an early stage and disregard those tasks which are viewed as being not urgent and not important. For the purpose of group planning you could use the matrix on a flip chart and simply write the tasks on post-it notes and stick in the relevant quadrants. At the end of the process you will be able to devise action plans for the important and non-urgent tasks and begin working on these straight away. The purpose of tackling the important and non-urgent tasks is to ensure that these don't become important and urgent. If you spend all of your time concentrating on the urgent and important tasks you will just be firefighting. You need to be proactive rather than reactive.

*Note this type of planning can be used for either individual or team planning*