Planning: How To Do It Effectively (No Dumb Overplanning!)

Planning can be a blessing and a curse. An art form of its own. Optimal plans win ample effort and resources. Overcooked plans freeze their user. Underdone plans confuse their user. Badly-made plans steer their user down the wrong path. No planning whatsoever is a plan for certain failure. Ineffective plans are costly, effective plans are profitable.

Defining Planning

Yet how does one tell? How can you filter good versus bad planning? What are the signs of an inadequate, just perfect, or over-the-top plan? Rewind the cassette. To answer how, you need the why behind planning. For the why, you need the what planning and its purpose is. Then you can evaluate your planning shenanigans.

Merriam-Webster spun “a method for achieving an end,” for the noun and “to devise or project the realization or achievement of something,” for the verb. Definitions that aren’t definitive. Planning ad litteram means the creation of a plan to achieve an objective. There’s our what.

A Plan’s Purpose

Why plan at all? Why not dive headfirst into action? Why waste time writing out what you’re going to do instead of doing? Two words: human limitations. Our savanna brains aren’t capable of holding, filtering, and prioritizing intricate steps to achieving something. Not if you wish to avoid error. Not if any brainpower whatsoever is required for the task. Not if the stakes are high and/or the pressure is overwhelming.

Thus, to overcome the inadequacies of brains—particularly working memory and cognitive load, nerds—we invented planning. That’s the why. Planning is ubiquitous in both formal and business-y and informal and personal use cases. Those who never plan are thereby planning to fail—at least in the intellectual realm. You’re like two-thirds of your brains behind as a planless wanderer!

No Plan = No Achievement

Skipping the planning part is a lethal option. Structured plans can be used by multiple people in projects, careers, military, sports, games, and business. No plan in these fields is a life-and-death, a win-or-lose, a decisive mistake. Don’t plan a product or service, and your business goes to shit. Don’t plan a project, and you cost the organization extra time and money. Don’t plan your exercise regimen, and you waste more time for less results.

Professional and personal pursuits need plans. Be they advanced military campaigns, company product launches, or abstract self-help routines, planning is a must-do. Drill that in. No matter the stakes, so long as it includes multiple steps you’d load your brain with, plan it in advance. Cherish your mental real estate!

The Profits Of Planning

Getting back to the original question, we get a clearer portrait now. The why is attaining an end goal while utilizing effort and resources in an optimized way. Done properly, it lets you progress on a given project while reasonably investing your limited time. A map. A GPS system for a task, subtask, or whatever granularity your ADHD conjures up. A must-have habit and skill in our fast-moving, noisy, and intricate world.

A cardinal part of any effective plan is the objective. What are you aiming to achieve with this plan? When should the objective be achieved? Who is needed to achieve the objective? Why is this objective important? How will you achieve the objective? Basic questions and answers that are the concrete base of any robust daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or even yearly, plan. Identify the finish line prior to darting forward.

Don’ts Of Planning

From then, the planning process circulates around the how. The actual, real-life tasks which need doing for the milestone to be reached. Albeit, here’s where the planning process gets knotty.

(1) a plan too rigid sucks (e.g. new ideas, priorities, offerings for partnerships, customer demands, technological innovation); (2) a plan too detailed sucks (e.g. planning as a form of procrastination, spending more time refining the how-to-do rather than doing); (3) a search for a perfect plan sucks (”perfect” plans do not exist, as you are limited to current data); (4) a plan with too much future granularity is counterproductive (you have clarity to thoroughly plan your current opportunities, but you will never be accurate when planning granularly far into the future because life); (5) a plan without a metric for progress is futile (the all-or-nothing thinking should be switched out for assessing whether the plan pushed you closer to the objective in a resourceful manner).

Don’ts and Dos and Don’ts and…

Chew on my list of planning don’ts. There are dos, too: (1) goal in mind, (2) success is defined, (3) light and simple, (4) granular for today and abstract for the future, and (5) flexible and changeable. Planning can and is one of the most powerful productivity and organization tools. Moderation, however, is vital. Miss a step, and your planning gizmos might be a misstep.

Overplanning is an issue. A disease. An epidemic. While smart to have a map of where your days, weeks, and months are going and what task is a priority, we’re in a craze about it. Preparedness is awesome. Detailed steps are terrific. Prioritized to-do lists are great. The issue is inaction. Stop cuddling your fucking planner and start getting those boxes ticked. Add step (0) to our planning dos, the above-everything, the priority numero uno: plan and do, not plan to do.

Be In Tune With Disappointment

The thesis of planning is a reduction of stress on that lazy brainiac of yours. Blame it for craving sugar, fat, and salt, and the sofa, and binge-watching TV shows, and anxiety, and… When planning leads to overthinking, micromanaging, and worrying about itsy-bitsy details of your life, you’ve missed the mark. No amount of future-oriented thought will prepare you for every setback and setup.

Planning should be a tool to organize the chaos in our fast-paced world. Don’t procrastinate with planning. Don’t get angry when things don’t go according to plan. Don’t detail future plans too much, and don’t shy away from detail on present plans. Come to terms with reality: you can’t control or predict everything. Follow the directions and dos and don’ts to a t, and a brighter future is a guarantee. Promise.

Final Thoughts

In the end, planning is an intricate process with many nuances. Too little or not planning at all is a deadly mistake. Too much or improper planning makes it harmful. Perfect planning: (1) action-oriented, (2) goal in mind, (3) success defined, (4) light and simple, (5) granular at present and abstract in the future, and (6) flexible and open to change. “Setting a goal is not the main thing,” said Tom Landry, “It is deciding how you will go about achieving it and sticking with that plan.”