Why Your Plans Fail: My Thoughts

October 11th 2007

Over at Lifehack.org they have an article discussing why plans fail and provides several ideas on how to more effectively and flexibly plan so as to avoid those bumps in the road. This has come at a convenient time for me as over the last month I have noticed how despite planning everything out on my weekly planner it got to the point where I ended up not actually working on much of it.

Writing down a next actions list is very much planning. Some people add some sort of schedule to it, I now personally plan what I’m going to do on a day-to-day basis. I’ve experimented with a few approaches when it comes to this topic, ranging from trying to plan as much of my week in advance (basically filling up my planner during the weekly review) to stringently planning only one day at a time. The former method failed miserably for the reasons the article stated. I was planning too far ahead and it was too inflexible an approach. For example, if I’m planning what to do on a Friday, what might seem like a good choice of tasks at the beginning of the week, was usually completely different on the day itself. Thus my system stuttered and if it had been any other system, I might have scrapped it and gone back to the drawing board. However, having used my weekly planner for a few months now I realized it’s not necessarily what you use, but how you use it.

With this in mind, I decided to as much as possible plan one day at a time. I’d write down any day specific things but other than I would only plan what I was doing that day on that day or the night before. What I have ended up doing in essence is have 6 daily reviews and then a weekly review on a Sunday when I fill out a new sheet. By planning daily it’s allowed me to be a lot more flexible and only put down what I know I’m going to do that day (after all, rather like with habits, seeing a bunch of incomplete next actions is not encouraging).

But of course this was only half of the planning puzzle. It’s one thing to plan, it’s something else entirely to actually follow through with the plan. I personally think that whether to act on your plan (successfully implementing it is another issue) is an issue of personal trust. By writing down a next action you are telling yourself that you need to do this and if you don’t do it, what does that mean? You’ve essentially broken a promise to yourself and it’s so very easy to slip into that bad habit territory where you get slack about saying something and not actually acting on it. This is another reason planning my entire week out failed because as many tasks ended up not being appropriate so through no fault of my own I was not doing what I originally planned to do. If your productivity levels are slipping and loads of next actions are being left undone, just sit down and make a promise to yourself to act on them. You can make the most elaborate and detailed plans but if you don’t have that conviction and motivation to actually use (or at least attempt to use) the plan, you may find yourself with an highly unproductive bad habit that you need to break.

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