Is Planning Undermining Your Success?

From the earliest moments of young adulthood, you have probably heard that making plans is essential for achieving success and stability. Plans should serve as a guiding force that helps you avoid missteps along your career path, but overthinking work goals may stop you from acting and taking beneficial risks. Use plans to outline the steps you need to take to accomplish your work goals while staying open to opportunities that arise along the way.

Remember, You're the Boss

Planning is merely a tool for keeping your thoughts and motivations in check. Creating checklists and schedules doesn't guarantee your ability to stay disciplined. If excitement and motivation about your work goals frequently changes to resentment and disappointment, you may be putting too much authority into your plan. Instead of expecting your plans to keep you grounded, use them to answer questions about what you want to achieve, why it's important, how to approach the problem and how to reach your destination from your current position.

Know Your Commitment Threshold

Everyone has different motivational triggers, so avoid sabotaging your work goals by setting milestones that conflict with your personality. In a weight-loss study at the University of Delaware, researchers tested the effect of easy and difficult goals on planners and nonplanners. When offered chocolates by a receptionist, planners with an easy goal of reducing 300 calories per day accepted more candy than nonplanners. When the goal was a daily reduction of 700 calories, planners accepted fewer chocolates than nonplanners.

The findings suggest that planning helped participants when a moderately difficult goal gave them more motivation to act. While breaking your goals into manageable chunks is useful, making them too simple can lead to overconfidence and procrastination. If you know the goal is doable, there's less urgency to complete it right away. However, degrees of difficulty are different for each person and project. Think about how you met or failed work goals in the past, and make future goals challenging enough to push you out of your comfort zone.

Act As You Reflect

Planning often stalls success because you obsess over the details and never commit to taking action. Planning can be a safety blanket that lets you feel as though you're accomplish something, but you aren't actually making any progress. To increase your effectiveness, identify the immediate steps you can take toward a goal, and follow through.

Choose productive actions that aren't likely to have a negative impact on your work goals, such as reconnecting with an influential friend, creating an online portfolio or speaking with a financial counselor about the risks of starting a business. Taking action right away helps you build momentum and confidence that you can meet your overarching goal. After each step, reflect on what you learn to refine your career path.

Planning is valuable for predicting and managing problems as you set work goals, making it easier to adapt when obstacles arise. However, the most important thing is to find fulfilling experiences. By keeping an open mind as you tackle new challenges, you may discover that problems are really opportunities in disguise.

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