It was interesting until I got to the last paragraph:
Better yet, where possible, avoid planning altogether. Use the "ready, fire, aim" approach, and correct course as you go along. As the blogger Steve Pavlina points out, the advantage is you quickly start getting real feedback. If you're starting a new business, say, you won't have to imagine how customers might respond to your adverts; you'll know. This approach also helps when it comes to those curious tasks that don't obey Hofstadter's law: the ones you fret about for weeks, but that end up taking 10 minutes. Sometimes, the secret to getting things done is just to do them.
This sounds like the type of rhetoric that you hear from people without real jobs, I'm afraid. Can you imagine pitching a business plan on this premise? How about a business case to stockholders, or a response to your utility company's bill?
There's an interesting nugget in the article, relative to our tendency to underestimate durations...but the answer isn't to ditch planning. The answer is to understand *why* the plans fall short, and drill down to the level of detail where the differences fall short. It's been my experience that plans fail when they lack sufficient detail - not vice versa.
Try this: write out a project plan for "getting ready in the morning." Identify every discreet task, independently of one another, and put a time estimate next to it. Sequence them, and add up the duration.
$20 says that your estimate comes out 40-50% higher than what you ACTUALLY do. Reason? At a certain level of granularity, your planning mind underestimates your execution mind. Seriously. You might guess that it takes you a minute and a half to dry off after getting out of the shower (ladies, forgive me), but in actual practice, it's more like 45 seconds. That's a 45 second difference - but a 100% inaccuracy.
Stacked, it's big.
Consider the massive construction project. So it takes ~6 weeks to pour the foundation. Okay. Drill down another level, and watch what happens. It takes ~1 day to arrange the contract, another day to mark out the lines, two days to acquire concrete...
There's fat in there - guaranteed. But you don't get it until you reach the right level of specificity in your plan.
It's my $.02, but after working in large-scale manufacturing (shipbuilding) for the last six years, and having managed multiple projects of major complexity, I believe this to be 100% true.
*shrug*
work. life. creativity
