The Product of Planning

What is the product of planning? What are you trying to produce?

You probably haven’t thought about it.

But if you did, you would likely say it is a plan. You plan something to make a plan.

But the primary product, the most important artifact, of planning is not the plan. You could burn the paper you wrote it on, delete the word document, or electronic Gantt chart, and still have the primary benefits of planning.

An ordered mind.

It doesn’t matter if you’re planning the next hour, the next day, a product release, a wedding, an event, or your entire life.

Capturing that plan in a document, or on the back of a napkin, or in a complicated project management system is fine. In fact, it will likely improve the process of planning significantly.

But it is a side effect. It is a byproduct of planning.

The primary product is in your head. It is a pattern that you’ve built. It is a set of neural pathways that your mind is more likely to use as you move into action.

Because action is the whole point.

Action is also what makes the byproduct, the written down plan, almost immediately out of date.

When your plan encounters the real world it will fall apart. Maybe piece by piece, slowly, over time. Maybe dramatically in a ball of flame. But it will degrade and die.

The patterns in your head will not.

While computers are awesome at recording data and not letting it change over time, your brain is awesome at storing patterns and adapting them to real life very well over time.

So, the patterns in your head will adapt, as long as the deviation between your plan and reality isn’t too great.

When the deviations are comprehensible, then you will naturally handle them in stride, the way you would handle a detour on the commute to work, or step around your kids Legos in the hallway to their room. Where you will naturally tell them to pick up the Legos.

And if the deviation is too great, often the best course of action is to go plan again. Not to rewrite a document or reorder a list, but to update your model of the world, to improve the way you see your future playing out. To make it fit reality.

Once you understand how important the primary product of planning is, then you can use the byproducts more effectively.

They become a set of cues as you work through your plan (i.e. the pattern in your head).

As cues, you can follow them or not. You can make the right decision in the moment, given the reality on the ground.

You can discard them when they diverge too much from reality.

Or you can update them to match the patterns in your head. Doing so will clarify and crystalize those patterns, that order.

And that is the product of planning.