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Best Laid Plans

Image source: Sweet Dreamz Design
Image source: Sweet Dreamz Design

This year is slipping away like grains of sand through the palm of my hand. We are already in the third week of 2014. My goal was to do certain things everyday and I am already playing catch up. I started so well but now I am struggling to keep up. Each missed day of targets feels like wasted opportunities.

I talked about the importance of discipline in my ‘New Year Targets’ blog post a couple of weeks ago. Discipline works best when you have focus. I have set too many targets to hit and this is like chasing several rabbits at the same time. This is a frustrating task because you end up catching none and yet expend so much energy.

One of the dangers of planning goals and projects is the ‘planning fallacy’. This is the tendency for people to underestimate how long they will need to complete a task, even when they have experience of similar tasks over-running. I am guilty of this and I bet some of you are as well. The planning fallacy (developed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky) was one of the new things I learnt about last week. It has helped me understand certain things about my goal setting and planning habits.

I also learnt about “Hofstadter’s Law” which states that things will always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law (which is that things will always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law).This is the reason why I plan to stop tackling more than I can realistically handle. The quest to be super productive can be counterproductive. The goal is to focus on doing a few things very well rather than doing a lot of things averagely well.

How are your year’s resolutions/targets going? Any challenges so far?

2 replies on “Best Laid Plans”

I feel your pain! I have so many projects and plans started but not completed (or even fine tuned yet) but I think the best way to think about it all is ‘slow down’. I just came to the realisation today that no everyone expects you to do as much as you do, so just a little of what’s in your head it worth doing! Good luck and we hope to catch up with you soon 🙂

How true, I have always over task myself, however – my resolution now, is to do a thing at a time

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