Why Long-Term Planning Is Useless
Conventional self-help advocates having both short-term plans and long-term plans to achieve your goals or targets. Actually, it isn't just self-help that advocates it, everyone in life says it.
Managers make plans for businesses, students make plans on how to study. We are so entrenched in planning we do them unconsciously to do all the things we want.
But what if plans don’t help?
What if they drain your mental and physical energy without giving you a worthwhile return?
Let’s us understand why we plan. The aim for planning is a clear, precise way to reach our goals.
So the important thing here is achieving our goals and not the plan!
Alright, at this point, you are probably dissing me in your head. Give me a chance as usual.
Plans are based on available data.
In fact, a plan is known to be better the more data you have.
This is because with more data, you can take into account more situations, predict more occurrences, and make more contingencies in the plan.
Hence, we use enormous amounts data to create the best and most complex plan.
After all, the best plan means it is ready for whatever the world throws at it that will derail you from achieving your goal, right?
However, will that ever be enough? Can you create the perfect plan? Is the effort worth the goal?
As a rule of thumb, the longer the period of the plan, the more data we need.
We put an immense amount of effort into creating long term plans, yet, more often than not, they fail.
Think of the last time you made a long term plan for your diet. No sugar, less carbs, more vegetables for 6 months, or a year. However, 2 weeks later, you find yourself back at square one munching on those delicious cupcakes your kind old neighbor next door brought over.
Or the time you planned to hit the gym and get buff. The plan was to wake up at sunrise, hit the gym immediately following the other plan for a gym routine you set and then head home and shower before the rest of the world wakes up feeling refresh and confident.
However, you find yourself skipping gym on the 5th day of your plan due to muscle aches. Or you couldn't get up due to the party yesterday. Or your children had a science project due and you had to help them with it.
With a small derailment of the plan, more likely than not, everything falls apart and the planner gives up.
The conventional approach to this is to get more data. What should I do to refuse in case my neighbor gives me cupcakes? How can I reduce muscle ache? What ways are there to complete the science project and get up at sunrise?
And it goes on and on and on. The sheer amount of possibilities in life equals to enormous amounts of data. An ordinary person would never be able to plan for every one of those circumstances.
And if that person tried, the effort of sifting and filtering of data would just drain their cognitive resources for a plan which might not even succeed.
Furthermore, a side effect from taking into account all that data would make you more necrotic and unable to react to the really important situations that affect your plan.
…the second fellow only reacts to real information, the first (the neurotic one) largely to noise. — Antifragile by Nassim Taleb
In other words, data is not king. Well, in this sense, it isn't.
So what if I suggested giving up the current method of conventional long-term plans?
The shock! The horror! What is he saying! Heretic!
I’m not saying giving up plans entirely, we need them for some sort of certainty in our lives. I’m just saying the planning style we usually use is to rigid and needs some tweaking.
There are two ways to going about tweaking long term plans.
The first
Give up long-term plans at all and focus on multiple short term plans to reach the goal.
The shorter the goal, the less data is needed and the less likely it is to be derailed.
I like to think of it like chess. Grandmasters in chess don’t focus on how far they can predict the game (like long term goals), instead they focus on making the best choice for this current possible move.
To put another way, instead of using depth of perception, aim for the width of perception.
Choosing the best possible move under the current situation over a number of short term plans will compound and eventually lead to your goal.
The second
If you really like long term plans and still want to stick with them, you can use the diversification principle.
It’s a simple investment principle which I love and use it as a mental model for most aspects in life.
Diversification finds uncorrelated assets and invest in them to reduce risk.
In layman terms, don’t put all your eggs in one basket, put them in multiple baskets so that if it falls, not all of them will shatter.
So how would you apply this to plans?
Diversify and simplify your long term plans.
Using the previous example of the gym. Instead of planning to wake up at sunrise and hit the gym, diversify it.
One plan is to wake up at sunrise and gym. Another is to free up the evenings after work to do it. One more is to use your lunch break. Or you replace the night time movie marathons with gym instead.
You might argue that is making a more complex plan. Then let’s diversify it even more.
The goal is to be buff right?
Join a parkor club in addition to gyming in case you fail.
Go swimming in the morning if your muscle aches are killing you from yesterdays workout.
Don’t go 5 days a week, aim for alternate days so you have the choice of which days you would like to go.
Diversification of a plan reduces the chances of you giving up when you your main plan gets derailed. In a sense, it gets derail onto another set of tracks towards your goal.
In conclusion
Be flexible in your plans but firm on your goals.
Bend like the bamboo when the wind howls, or you will break like the tree.
