Separating Planning from Doing

When working on creative projects (which often for me are software development projects) I sometimes notice that I might slow down on a particular task, becoming ineffective for a while before possibly even grinding to a halt completely.

This often happens when I have not drawn a clear enough line between the act of "planning" and the act of "doing".

I may have skipped the planning part and am trying to plan and do simultaneously.

In other words; I'm winging it!

Making it up as you go along

It's sometimes tempting to make it up as you go along. Especially so if you're experienced in the type of work you're doing. And indeed sometimes this works. Jazz musicians do this well, but it's often not quite so advisable for more complex creative tasks where some additional deliberate planning might be needed.

This is a trap that I can fall into particularly when I'm working on my own self-defined projects - where there is no external pressure to do any detailed planning - or perhaps when I've simply underestimated the complexity of a particular task ahead of time.

In software development, this can easily happen when I stumble across an architecture or abstraction problem that I need to work out. If I'm self-aware enough in that moment I'll pause, reflect and write out a quick plan, either in my to-do list for the project, or in the case of coding, as comment lines in my code file.

But sometimes I forget the benefit of this pausing and reflecting. Not wanting to break my flow, I'll try to hash out the solution in realtime as I'm coding. Fire and motion...

This problem can also manifest as procrastination, prior to even getting going. I don't even start the task in question because it feels unclear and ill-defined. I'm not sure where to start. I may be tempted to put it off and do something easier or more fun.

The Third Creation

In his brilliant but terribly named book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey asserts that all things are created twice. He suggests that there is always a mental first creation, where you plan or design in your head, followed by the physical, second creation where you make the thing you designed. So, quite literally, you begin with the end in mind.

Recently I've been thinking about an additional layer of granularity to this principle, where the first step - the mental first creation - gets split into two discrete sub steps; the act of thinking about the design, and then the act of documenting this design. Therefore the physical act of creation, becomes the third creation.

I think there is a useful distinction between creating (designing, planning) something in one's head, and actually documenting that creation by way of a written plan. It's possible to only do the former but there is an extremely notable and potent difference between the act of designing something in your mind and actually documenting that design in written form.

If a plan exists only in your head, it can often lack clarity. It's also easily forgotten and difficult to share.

Further, you may not even realise how much your plan lacks clarity until you try to write it down or communicate it to others.

It does seem that thinking on paper leads to clearer thinking ¹ .

So for me personally, for a certain class of problem the process is not complete unless I've both planned it and documented it before starting to build.

If I'm feeling stuck on a particular problem, I'll try to remember to keep asking myself the following question:

"Have I properly planned this work or am I winging it?"

Over-planning

This idea further leads to a technique that I've often used to beat procrastination in general with great success. In particular this helps with my ADHD (which unfortunately is a bit of a procrastination multiplier ² ).

The technique is to keep breaking down my plan into smaller, more granular steps, until the resistance I'm feeling dissolves to the point where I feel ready to take action.

No step is too small or trivial. If I'm really struggling to start something, the first few steps may literally be "Open laptop", "Open application X", "Load document Y"... etc.

I don't do this every time. I only use this technique when I'm continually hitting up against procrastination and resistance (which admittedly, is quite often!)

But in those cases if I follow this process diligently, it's quite rare that I'll find a task that I cannot break down sufficiently to break through my negative inertia and get going.