How to Consistently Harness Your Clearest Thinking
Planning is important, but the most important part of every plan is to plan on the plan not going according to plan - Morgan Housel.
I missed something at work today. We all missed it, but typically I’m kicking myself. We don’t know the full monetary cost or how long it’s going to delay the project - we’ll find out next week. For now, we just have to sweat and wait. It all could’ve been avoided with a simple checklist. Or a quick premortem – a walkthrough of the potential reasons we might fail when working to deliver the project.
Hindsight is one of our greatest strengths. We’re equipped with extreme clarity when looking back after the event. “The answer was obvious” we convince ourselves. But sadly that’s just not how life unfolds. We need clarity when it matters. Clarity amongst the ambiguities of life. Clarity when we’re under pressure and various stakeholders are pulling at our attention. Clarity when there aren’t enough hours to pick up all the load. Clarity to do the right thing when it feels like we’re being treated unfairly on multiple different levels. Internal calm when externally, noise prevails.
Banana Skins On The Planning Route
When making plans we often fall into the same traps over and over again. We don’t allow for enough time to carry out a task. Or we don’t allow for a big enough team to deal with the demands of a project. Or we simply don’t allow for any kind of buffer – buffer in design, buffer in time, buffer in budgets. More importantly, we don’t consider what the quality of our decision making will be in scenarios where we’re not at our best. Especially scenarios where we’re under pressure.
Anecdotally, my experience of this is that we do this because often we make plans when we’re at our very best. Or we make plans for a future self that we just can’t relate to today – it’s easy to say you’re going to run 5K next Thursday morning, but it’s Saturday today. You’re well rested and you feel like you can do anything. On Thursday however, you’ll likely be close to weekly burnout. It’ll be cold in the morning. Your excuses will be valid. But sadly that won’t move you forward in your quest to hit 5K that day. We assume that today’s optimal conditions will hold strong in the future. Every day in the future.
Whilst it would be obviously unproductive to plan for every possible eventuality that may or may not occur in the future, we can harness the power of our experience and clear thinking today, for summoning at a later date. I’ve found that amongst the many planning tools and productivity apps, it’s still 2 key tools that allow you to gain the most traction in your planning.
Make A Checklist
Many aspects of our work can be broken down into a repeatable set of steps. Yes, each project – anything we’re working on with a sequence of steps - will have its nuances but within most projects, we can broadly repeat the same steps to get to a desired outcome.
Consider an electrician. To carry out a quick job on an electrical box in your basement, they’ll carry out the following checks before beginning:
- Safety: Isolate the box by turning off the mains.
- Entry: Ensure various types of keys to open the box are stored in the toolbox.
- Diagnostics: Ensure pliers, electrical tape, voltage indicator etc. are in the toolbox.
- Testing and completion: Test and complete check-sheets for client record.
Or consider the Weekly Preview I carry out to ensure I’m not falling behind or missing items on my projects at work.
Checklist for Weekly Preview
These repeatable steps are simply leveraging the power of checklists – the power of your mind while it was in a calm and clear state of thinking.
Carry Out A Premortem
A premortem is a basic mental exercise. You walk yourself through your future project and think about what could go wrong at each stage. We do this every day without thinking about it.
- I’m going to the airport: That unreliable District Line train could trip me up. I best take the Piccadilly Line at the nearest change.
- I’ve got that presentation: I’ll probably get resistance from that team member. How can I help them relate to this perspective or that?
- I’m building that extension on my house: My budget needs to allow for a condition survey of the ground.
Sadly, we don’t do this enough on our projects. But within that reality there lies the opportunity. The opportunity to be the one who can gather the team to walk through each step and identify the ambiguities and banana skins. Once the hurdles arrive, you’ll be familiar with them. Therefore you’ll know how do deal with them. You’ll be the calm within the storm because familiarity breeds calm.
That could have been me.
References
The quote at the top is from Morgan Housel’s book, The Psychology of Money. It’s genuinely incredible. It opened my eyes to many things in personal finance and in life.
