“No plan survives contact with the future.”
Plans are not guarantees. You can’t write your own future as if it’s a novel—not everything is under your control. So, what’s the point of planning then?
Planning Provides Insight
Planning improves clarity. Thoughts can be slippery; it’s easy to convince ourselves everything makes sense in our head. Writing down your thoughts allows you to gain perspective and refine your thinking.
Planning helps us drill deeper. We gain a more nuanced understanding of our desires and steps on how to move forward.
Planning Improves Your Odds
Planning helps you identify contradictions that could derail you and alternatives that open up new possibilities for you to explore. It helps you align your vision for the future with what you’re doing today.
Planning often works the opposite of what you expect—not helping you to figure out what to do, but helping you to figure out what NOT to do. The easiest way to improve your odds at success and make better decisions is not learning how to make good decisions, but learning how to avoid bad decisions.
Planning Enables Action
Planning reduces our perceived uncertainty about the future, enabling us to act faster and with more confidence.
Planning is forethought; it allows us to pre-calculate the risks and benefits of our actions so we can act quickly when an opportunity presents itself.
Planning reduces our stress about the future. While we can’t control life, we can control our responses to life. Planning makes those responses deliberate. It integrates our intuition with our intellect and reduces our internal conflicts.
Planning Is Important…Not Plans
Did you notice that I used “planning” and not “plans” in each of the above? It’s the process of planning that provides all these benefits, not the plans themselves.
Plans are an artifact of the process. They are still useful to remind us of the decisions and insights we found through the planning process. But even if you never look at your plan again, you’ll gain just from the process of making a plan.