As I’ve become an evangelist of daily and weekly planning over the last couple of years, I’ve chatted with many people about the idea.

Many are interested, but few adopt the practice. It strikes most folks as just one more thing to shoehorn into their already busy lives, and it’s true that planning takes time. It’s time well-spent, though, and the world of professional sports can teach us why.

Jim Rohn once pointed out that no professional sports team in the world ever starts a game without a game plan. Not one.

From the Hickory Crawdads to the New York Yankees, from the Slovenian Basketball League to the NBA, no pro team on earth shows up to the arena without a detailed plan for beating the other team.

It’s easy to understand why. There’s just too much at stake—the players are all being paid (some quite handsomely), the facilities cost thousands of dollars a minute to operate, and the paying fans expect to see a well-executed game. Sports is big business, and a game plan is a foregone conclusion.

All this for a bunch of adults chasing after a ball for the entertainment of others.

How much more valuable is one of our precious, irreplaceable days than a sporting match? We can each expect around 29,000 days, on average. When they’re gone, they’re gone.

Doesn’t each one deserve a plan? Doesn’t each one deserve to be crafted like a work of art? Our time is our most precious resource—doesn’t it deserve to be treated as such?

Make the time to plan out your days and your weeks. The extra effort is worth it (because you are).