Efficient planning entails being able to have an agile and adaptable solution to a problem. To know how to plan for the problem, you have to know what the problem is. What are you working with, what do you have available, and what’s off limits? These questions answer where to start and how to draw up the primary plan. But what do you do when the situation changes unexpectedly?
A good plan can be the difference between success and failure, but there is such a thing as too much planning. Where does the profit from planning turn from black back to red? Too much planning is just as detrimental as too little planning.
The difference between planning and overplanning comes from 4 hidden dangers which turn a good plan into an overplanned mess. When you overplan, you overcomplicate the process, plan for the wrong things, waste time, and lose clarity. Once you’re aware of them, you can focus on stopping them.
Breaking Down a Plan
There are going to be variables to every equation in every step of a plan. What variables matter and what don’t? For something like Big O Notation, the small variables really don’t matter. At scale, all of the small factors are a rounding error away from not existing at all. When you overplan, you spend too much time on the small parts and not enough time on the actual meat of the problem.
Most of the issues will (hopefully) be rounded off. You don’t start thinking about the specifics of the last 20 miles of a 1,000 mile journey on the first step. Likewise, you don’t win the race if you don’t know where the ending point is. You have to know where you actually start, where you’re going, how you can do it, and how you want to do it. This doesn’t mean the plan can’t change or adapt though.
The First Hidden Danger – Overcomplicating the Process
The first hidden danger for overplanning is overcomplicating the process. A plan should be memorable and simple when distilled. There may be higher level of complexity for the individual tasks, but ultimately each task can then be further decomposed into smaller units which are simple and memorable (in context; create ammonia using the Haber-Bosch process is simple to a chemist, and a jumble of letters and symbols to most other people).
It’s easy to overcomplicate a plan when you think about each step and what can go wrong. While this is a good practice for planning the general process, it ends up being a huge detriment to creating the individual steps of the plan. The difference between good planning and overcomplicating the plan is the subtly of being savory or salty.
When you overcomplicate the process, you allow the other dangers to manifest. A simple plan doesn’t have room for you to plan for the wrong things (without being fundamentally wrong), waste time (because goals are defined), or lose clarity (because it’s simple and memorable). Keep it simple, stupid, and keep it stupid simple.
Simplifying the Process
Simplify the plan by dividing it into individual units. Each unit should involve a specific task, what needs to be done to fulfill the task, why the task is being done, and the purpose of the task. By simplifying the plan to these units, you make each unit effectively a black box which can be further reduced as necessary to adapt to the situation.
If you’re making pancakes, you need to gather ingredients. If someone is tasked with getting flour, they need to know what the task is (to collect flour), what they need to do to fulfill their task (we need at least 4 cups of flour; it should be bleached, all-purpose flour), why they need flour (the recipe requires flour to make pancakes), and the purpose of the task (flour binds our ingredients together, it is the base of our whole recipe).
Make the plan have clear goals and a clear purpose. If the store is out of bleached, all-purpose flour, but has self-rising cake flour, should we buy it? If the person doesn’t know, they at least should know to call and ask now. While it might be the same, it doesn’t fit the purpose. If the person tasked lacks the knowledge to know what the difference is between the two in our recipe, they know what the goal is and can better adapt (for instance, calling to ask without assuming).
The Second Hidden Danger – Speculation and Fantasy
The danger in overcomplication isn’t just making things hard for anyone following the plan, it also leads to speculation and fantasy. Speculation is dangerous because a good decision can quickly become bad depending on how you weight the factors. Flights of fantasy are indulgences in “what could” happen rather than “what actually could” happen.
Flights of fantasy and speculation don’t really fit into a simple plan. The more complex the plan, the easier it is to think of edge cases which turn into edge cases’ edge cases which turn into speculation which turns into fantasy. At a certain point, it gets easier to plan to adapt or regroup rather than building in contingencies.
Grounding Speculation
Speculation is the result of letting emotions control how you weight the factors affecting your process. Fantasy comes from trying to account for everything. You can’t and you shouldn’t. Garbage in becomes garbage out.
If you’re planning to build a house, should you account for earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, inclement weather, and wildfires in an area with none of these? What about when you plan a budget appliance, should you plan for regular surges from lightning strikes for the average user?
Make sure you understand the purpose and what the whole goal of your plan is. For our pancake example, are we making pancakes for someone with Celiac’s or not? Are we dealing with vegans, vegetarians, or omnivores at the table? Insisting on gluten-free flour or a vegan recipe isn’t going to help your group if you do it because “someone might have dietary concerns” without knowing or at least having some evidence this might be the case. Know when you go into the planning phase what you’re working with and you can cut speculation and fantasy off from convoluting the plan.
The Third Hidden Danger – Procrastination and Wasting Time
When you plan for every eventuality and every possibility, you end up procrastinating on implementation and wasting time. The plan can become more important than the implementation without the right impetus to keep going. I know I’ve wasted time planning for every eventuality only to find out that my planning was all in the wrong direction.
What is the purpose of your plan? Is it to make sure you only do the same task once where possible, or is it a ritual to put off the implementation? You have to look at this objectively. It’s good to measure twice, but after eight or nine times, what are you accomplishing? Sometimes you just cut a little extra and sand down.
Pushing Forward
A good plan may take as long as the implementation, but some plans are quick. If you keep working on the plan, what are you getting out of it? I can sit all day working on the layout for an article including: the skeleton, the goal, the purpose, the idea, the layout, the organization, the breakdown, the plan, the plot, the angle, the function, but at some point, I lost you and I missed the point in this list of tasks.
You eventually need to break away from planning and get things done. Plan for what you can, but plan to adapt as well. You don’t need to procrastinate or waste time if you build brakes and safeties into your plan to reassess where you are when things go off course.
If you try to make an application idiot proof for every single person in the world, you’re never going to get started. At some point, you need to actually do something and see what actually happens. You can’t learn a language in a vacuum, you have to use it eventually or it never really becomes concrete. Don’t let your plan stagnate, push forward.
The Fourth Hidden Danger – Loss of Clarity
The more (needlessly) complex a plan is, the less clear it is. Each of these hidden dangers further contributes to this one, but a loss of clarity can be a problem all its own. What is the purpose of the project or plan and what is it aiming to solve? If you can’t answer this, why are you even bothering?
Clarity makes the plan easier to adapt, easier to work around, and easier to understand. A loss of clarity is a loss in definition. What constitutes success if you aren’t clear what the goal is? Who does what they should and who does what they shouldn’t if the whole thing is fuzzy?
Defining Purpose to Define Clarity
A plan without a purpose cannot be clear. Without a purpose, the tasks are just tasks, but they have no definition or reason behind them to guide them. Why is each task necessary?
Clarity makes less palatable tasks more acceptable. I wouldn’t want to go count the grains of rice in a bag, but if it somehow factored into mathematical research, it would at least be understandable. Some tasks in a plan just plain suck, but they have to be done. Make it clear why they need to be done or they become an exercise in going through the motions.
Clarity also makes it so a task can live in the context of the plan and in the context of the situation. Both of these factors can and will make or break a plan. If we send our friend out to get flour, and we tell them to go to Acme because the flour is cheap and Acme is close, what do they do if Acme is out of flour? Ideally, they just go somewhere else. What if they were supposed to go to Acme because it’s the only place with the right gluten-free flour? Now, the whole plan might be off, but if they wait to get back with the wrong bag, then we’ve wasted everyone’s time.
Unraveling the Mess
It’s easy to walk the line between planning thoroughly and overplanning, but it’s hard to know just where you crossed it. What are you doing and why?
The most important behind instituting a plan is to make sure that you keep it simple and break it up sanely to prevent it from becoming too complex. This will help prevent you from wasting time on speculation and fantasy, as well as prevent you from wasting time and resources on the wrong parts of the plan. Make your plan clear so that it stays more adaptable.
If you can keep your plan simple, you can prevent these issues. While keeping the plan simple prevents the other hidden dangers from manifesting easily, it’s hard to know when complexity is necessary or egregious. If a situation is possible, is it speculation? How probable is it, and how does it fit in with the rest of the project or plan? Where do you draw the line between detailed planning and superfluous planning to prevent wasting time?
Clarity comes from simplicity, but it has to be treated as its own element too. A perfect diamond cut wrong can make the same quality gem as a blotched diamond cut magnificently. Is the plan fleshed out right or not? If it’s fleshed out, is it fleshed out to save time or waste time? Every step needs to work for you or it works against you.
Image by Adina Voicu from Pixabay