“Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future.”, Master Yoda.

The more uncertainty there is, the less it’s relevant (and efficient) to have concrete plans into the far future.

This will be the first in a series of articles about “future planning”, I will try (try because this is one of those topics which one can write several books and still not finish covering it) to lay the ground rules for making plans: what are the best practices, how to go about when thinking about and conceiving plans and of course: execution and monitoring.

The first step is of course to set our goal: general guidelines for that can be found here and more details all through the different Pillars in the site.

Now that (hopefully) we have our goals written and set: let’s dive in.

The amount of details our plans needs is a function of Span of time and Certainty

Details = Certainty / Time Span

In this article we will dive deep into this concept and in the following articles we will break it down to time span’s that we humans usually use (day, week, year, decades or lifetime)

As the formula states the amount of details we will include in our plan should be a function of our certainty and the time horizon:

Certainty - is an estimate of how confident we are in our ability to follow through with the plans we conceive and the expected outcome, we should be aware of:

• Our own biases (are we over optimistic or pessimistic in general, are we objective in the context of the area related to the examination) - this requires self awareness and receiving genuine feedback from our environment

• Breakdown of the outcomes into elements within and outside our direct control:

  • Things that our in our direct control - “Success at anything will always come down to this: focus and effort. And we control both.” – Dwayne Johnson

    • It’s worth remembering that the amount of effort we are willing to put is in our control and if it seems “too much” than we should reevaluate the goal - i.e. adjust it accordingly: maybe one wanted to be a chess grand master but after a more in depth examination of what it takes decided that in terms of ROI (return on investment) or “value for money” - being a chess master is the more suitable goal or at least for the time being as one can always level up on goals set in the past.

  • Things that we have partial control over:

    • We should aim to maximize the part that is in our control

    • We can’t guarantee: winning the match, getting the promotion or making the sale but we can: practice harder, do our best according to the job standards and prepping for the sale talk

  • Things that we have no control of:

    • This we should treat as externals and prepare for possible outcome - be it prepare plans to meet our goals in different scenarios and even more importantly prepare our mindset for all outcomes that may come so we may deal with them and keep performing at our top level.

Time span - the span of time for our plans ranges from immediate (take a break now and pour some coffee) to the extremely long term (create a real estate portfolio that will supply one’s grandchildren passive income) and obviously: anything in between

The time span is a function of our goals (and dreams) and as stated in the formula: it is an independent variable - i.e. it stands on it’s own and should be evaluated regardless of all other externals (probabilities, current options, required effort, ext..) - this will be reserved for the “details”.

Now that we have a formula for addressing the Details - which are in practice our plan we can move forward with “making plans”

Final note: the coming articles will address the plan making process and outcomes based on the time horizon (days, weeks ext), as in the formula above we can take the opposite approach and use Certainty as our independent variable i.e. for things absolutely certain we can have a detailed plan regardless how far into the future it will take us and for things with very low certainty we will have only a very basic idea of what we should do

It’s important to note that although less natural the other method is highly useful and I am planning (lower certainty) to write about those but just to illustrate the point with an example:

Absolute certainty: The death of the Monarch of England is a certain event and as such is planned to miracles details even years before the event is likely to occur

Very low certainty: Chances of winning the lottery are very low and so most people don’t prepare a detailed investment and money allocation plan (and course infrastructure) for the event of winning.

Now we are set to dive deep into the magic of detailed planning of our lives.