“I’m Wasting My Time Planning!”

That’s what a friend told me recently.

And it was true.

She had just spent hours trying to plan out the coming week.

You see, school is almost upon us, and she was trying to get all her kids ready: clothes, school supplies, freshman orientation, fall sports kicking off, etc.

The list of things to do is long.

But that doesn’t mean that it should take hours to plan it out.

For her, though, there is a problem.

Her orientation toward planning is one of two orientations you can have: optimizing or satisficing.

An optimizer is one who plans so that they don’t waste a single minute. So that they don’t backtrack when running errands. So that they don’t make any extra trips.

The satisficer approaches things differently. He or she just puts enough time into planning so that they can get started working. Sure, later on they may have to redo some work, or go back to a store they’ve already gone to.

Obviously, neither ideal is, well, ideal.

The optimizer doesn’t want to waste a single minute, but will waste hours planning, thus negating all that effort. The satisficer gets started quick, but often gets bogged down later.

What does this mean for you?

It means to find the right balance. Spend some time planning up front. Do your best to put together a plan that makes sense, but don’t kill yourself trying to avoid any extra work. Life is work. Work is work. It’s ok to buckle down and do it. It’s ok to redo some too.

One way you can tell if you’re over-optimizing when planning is if you keep changing your plans. If you’ve spent some time working out a plan for moving forward, and have rearranged things more than twice, it’s time to just go do something.

This friend of mine has another problem that contributes to wasted planning effort – stay tuned for tomorrow’s email to find out what it is, and if you have the same problem.