— Planning, Efficiency, Productivity, Lifestyle — 13 min read
Modern society is sort of pushing us towards planning. It is mostly expected that a person of a reasonable age have a plan of how to live their life. Where to study? Where to work? What are your life goals? A disclaimer: I do not believe in long term planning - neither in life nor in work. Yes, you can set a 2+ years goal, hit it and feel awesome, this is for sure. But most of the time, I see people and companies fail to reach these imaginary goals. It has nothing to do with personalities or productivity, it is simply that modern world is changing at pace unseen before. So, objectively, there is no way you can set such a flexible goal that it will stay reasonable for longer time span. Another extreme case thing is a ultra short term planning, when people are setting up 20 nano-goals for a day and behave like robots all day long, instead acting creatively. In this post I want to dig deeper into the topic of planning and hopefully figure out how to strike a nice balance.
While writing all that I started to realize that it is probably unrealistic to expect anybody read all that, so here you can quickly jump to sections you are interested in at most:
The way I define planning, is basically an attempt to program the situation and the future to meet desired goal(s). To me it sounds like very complex task to be blindly applied to a human life. My profession is a software engineer, so I program stuff everyday. That's basically about it - computer programming, is an attempt to foresee a flow of data through the software to fulfill a desired task. That's exactly a situation where you want to overplan, because the amount of end results as well as possibilities of what can happen is usually finite. So if your logical thinking is good enough, you can plan everything ahead of time and develop a so called "perfect" software, people will love. This is the reality of the closed system where exhaustive planning makes sense.
But human live is (usually) not a closed system, this is why we have a very important property - creativity. Our creativity and an ability to adjust quickly, is what makes us better than machines in many tasks. In my opinion, overplanning tends to limit our ability to be creative by limiting a number of options in life. I strongly believe, it can hurt us badly, both professionally and personally. Every day, our life offers us a virtually infinite number of options to chose from, and having too much plans does not let you experience it. Many of the best ideas and breakthroughs appeared "out of nowhere" - at least this is how it looks like. Personally, I believe that such great ideas happen when a person has some space to unleash their creativity and let it flow for a while.
By no means, I am saying that we should stop planning, I am just saying that it should not be considered as a necessary attribute of success. It is very important to have a general understanding of where you are going(strategy of mission if you will), but we should always leave ourselves time to enjoy our lives and let our amazing brain do its magic.
Moreover, it can be very demotivating, when things are going not according to your perfect plan, you put a lot of effort into. Just keep in mind, that it is very likely that your plan was perfect by the time you created it, but during the execution, some variables might have changed, making your plan unrealistic or suboptimal.
In addition, the fact of having a plan, subconsciously forces us to pick options according to the plan, instead of looking for real-time opportunities that might just appeared in from of you.
With that said, let's dig deeper into specifics of this topic.
First of all, there is nothing wrong with setting up a long term goal to motivate yourself or an organization. It just has to be done wisely and timely.
A bit of a personal story from me. I was born and raised in Russia before moving to Germany(where I currently live). We, and AFAIK most of Asian countries have a tendency to plan the life of our children for them. Like when you turn 16-17, you and your family must do the choice which university do you pick for further education. We've been constantly told that if you do not make the choice immediately for the next 6 years (bachelor + master), you will inevitably fail in life. And I still remember how it feels - as a child, you believe in it blindly and stress out a lot(because most of the time you just never had another perspective). Also, this is very uncommon to switch specialization as you go - this is typically perceived a lack of stance and reliability. The ugly truth is that when you are 16-17, there is no way you can make such a decision (even with help of your parent). As a result, in a young age, lots of people locked down in a path(because it is according to some plan) that is totally incompatible with their personalities and strengths. Next step is directly to start hating your new job from day 1. Only when I first visited western countries, I learned, that many people here are taking about a year of a free time to decide what they want to do, by simply trying to live independent life, or travel, when they have enough financial resources. Moreover, there is no fear to switch a university after a year or two of studying, when they realize that they did a bad choice. I strongly believe, this is the right path to build a healthier and happier society, instead of making long term plans at very young age.
Later on, in life, people keep making similar mistakes: "I want to be married by age X", "I want to have kids by age Y", "I want to become a CEO by age Z", etc. I believe, setting such goals usually results in anxiety and in inability to quickly catch an opportunity, life throws at you.
Of course, you will find lots of fancy stories of some over-achievers, who set huge goals and hit every one of them. The truth, however, is that only a small portion of such people will ever admit that the true reason for their sky-rocket success is luck and timing for their idea, and not their solid life plan. This is simply how life works, reaching every level is much harder than the previous one, until you hit a ceiling, which you can not break without a nice portion of luck. Yes, every generation will have a bunch of incredible people, who will truly achieve success due to planning, discipline and an exceptional combination of skills, but you can not blindly bet on being one of them.
Same stuff is in business. Planning ahead for more than a quarter simply makes no sense as situation and priorities might change vastly as you go. it's is not uncommon in business to see goals like: "we have to do XYZ within next 8 month and we expect it to have the following effect on certain metric Z". The problem with long-term goals is that it allows certain type of people to over-focus on the execution, and blindly follow the plan instead of accepting the reality. If it happens, the person(s), who set those goals will receive less objective feedback "from the field" and will have no way of adjusting the strategy. As a result, the organization will try hard to hit an unrealistic long-term goal and suffer from lack of flexibility, because "nothing is a priority right now, except for that goal set months ago".
Another problem is setting false expectations. When seeing a goal, a lot of people might subconsciously treat it as a new inevitable reality. But this is simply untrue, plan might fail and demotivate too many people around you.
I would consider it from multiple perspectives as personal and professional approaches could be a little different.
Truth to be told, I was the one, thinking that having a good plan can fix any day. But it turned out, this is not how it works. If you work alone, or making a serious career change, you might need to have a step-by-step plan of what should be done, simply because the process is too unknown for you - I would actually argue that you need not a plan, but a guide, or a HOWTO, in such a case. However, this is not what can be considered to be a common case. I also understand that on the certain level, you need an extensive planning every day, ignoring anything what is not in the plan, because expectations are too high. But, again, is it really your case? In most of the cases, too much of planning is simply redundant for a regular person on a regular day. What is much more important is how quickly you can switch contexts, especially when it is required to help somebody to move forward. I saw some people saying: "I have my own goals for now, which should be my priority". But this is not how it works in a common work environment. An individual isn't(shouldn't be) judged based on the net outcome of their work only. Another criteria is how quickly a person can adapt, pick up a new task/skill or switch a context to help a co-worker - this is why you need to stay creative and keep your mind flexible. This is extremely important, because at some stage you should start thinking not only about your local plans, but also about how your team/product will benefit from it.
So, the conclusion here is that it's all about observing an environment and making creative decisions, instead of blindly following some plan you wrote before you went to bed yesterday.
I am a software engineer, so I will handle engineering separately. If you did planning/grooming or what not, before doing an actual work, it does not mean task is crystal clear. Ok, maybe it can be clear from the business perspective, but it is never clear in technical terms until you start doing it with your own hands. If you see that some pieces of the puzzle are not adding up, never hesitate questioning the entire implementation proposal you discussed before. So, the rule I personally follow here is: "Define a solid business goal, leaving technical implementation proposal closer to the time when you will actually start working on the thing". Otherwise, you might end up making plan, which will never pass reality check and yet look reasonable and beautiful. A good example is e.g. relative complexity estimation (story points) which could be discussed like crazy during planning, burning time of the full team without any objective value. So, when you are doing things like the one I just described, remember that this is never a 10 mins discussion - it is always "10 mins * amount of people in the meeting" time penalty.
Life should not be chaotic, this is for sure. But please, leave some space to simply doing nothing(at least in theory). If you will constantly keep yourself busy with micro tasks, most of which are irrelevant anyway, you will never be able to start something new, find a new hobby, spend time with family. When writing up any daily plans, always ask yourself: "Does it move me forward towards some larger goal, sparks a joy, or am I simply occupying time by tasks I made up out of nothing?" And if you can not answer it positively and confidently, consider dropping it from your list. I would even put it like that: "Fight for your time, since typically, you only get less of it, as your life moves forward".
So, is it really possible to balance by keeping your life organized and leave some room for creativity? I strongly believe the answer is "yes". Here are some rules I follow:
When planning a life, I always try to think about how cool the journey is going to be. Here are my 4 items to follow:
So the bottom line here is, when planning a personal life, set stretch goals which will move you towards the person, you want to become. Try to avoid discrete long terms goals (do A on month B) and leave some space for joy in life, as it is equally important for your psychological health.
I hope you enjoyed the reading. Main messages here are:
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