Epistemic confidence: Highly confident. This post doesn’t cover everything relevant to the topic, but I am confident that everything presented is solid.

You may have noticed that planning can be rather difficult. Granted, not all plans are difficult, planning what you’re going to have for dinner isn’t too bad usually; however serious planning can range from merely daunting to seemingly intractable. Think of the challenge of planning towards a satisfying career, a fulfilling relationship, the success of your startup, or the simple preservation and flourishing of human civilization.

I present here a gears-level, reductionist account of planning which makes it starkly clear why planning is hard. The point not being that we should give up because planning is futile. Far from it. With a detailed model of the factors which make planning hard, we can derive a unified roadmap for how to get better at planning and ultimately have a unified, powerful approach to making better plans.

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What is planning?

We can’t talk about why planning is hard before clarify what planning is. It’s pretty simple:

Planning is the selection of actions in order to achieve desired outcomes. [1]

The need for planning arises when the following conditions hold:

There are multiple states that the world can be in.
You have preferences over which states the world is in.
There are multiple actions available to you, each of which might cause the world to more likely be in some states rather than others.
You cannot take all of the actions, either because you lack the resources to do so or because the actions are inherently exclusive.

These conditions lead to a refinement of the definition above: planning is the selection of actions from among competing alternatives. One must prioritize among one’s available options and allocate resources to whichever options rank most highly.

Often one is allocating resources among multiple options in proportion to their priority, but I think we can still rightly call it prioritization even when one is only deciding between allocating 100% of their resources to only one option of out two. In o...

Swapna Rao

Swapna Rao