Fussy
To reach a goal, how specific should your plans be? In one carefully controlled experiment, researchers monitored college students taking part in a program to improve their skills at studying. In addition to receiving the usual instructions on how to use time effectively, the students were randomly assigned among three planning conditions. One group was instructed to make daily plans for what, where, and when to study. Another made similar plans, only month by month instead of day by day. And a third group, the controls, did not make plans.
The researchers felt they were on solid ground in predicting that the day-by-day plans would work best. But they were wrong. The monthly planning group did the best, in terms of improvements in study habits and attitudes. Among the weaker students (though not among the good ones), monthly planning led to much bigger improvements in grades than did the daily planning. Monthly planners also kept it up much longer than the daily planners, and the continued planning thus was more likely to carry over into their work after the program ended. A year after the program ended, the monthly planners were still getting better grades than the daily planners, most of whom by this point had largely abandoned planning, daily or otherwise.
Why? Daily plans do have the advantage of letting the person know exactly what he or she should be doing at each moment. But their preparation is time-consuming, because it takes much longer to make thirty daily plans than a broad plan for the month without any daily details. Another drawback of daily plans is that they lack flexibility. They deprive the person of the chance to make choices along the way, so the person feels locked into a rigid and grinding sequence of tasks. Life rarely goes exactly according to plan, and so the daily plans can be demoralizing as soon as you fall off schedule. With a monthly plan, you can make adjustments. If a delay arises one day, your plan is still intact.
The most extensive experiments in fuzzy-versus-fussy planning have been the uncontrolled ones run by military leaders on the battlefields of Europe. Napoleon once summarized his idea of strategic military planning: “You engage, and then you wait and see.” By making contact with the enemy and then improvising, he triumphed and made his armies the envy (and the scourge) of Europe. His rivals to the north, the Prussians, groped for some advantage to make sure they didn’t keep losing to the French, and they came up with more planning. The officer class of other countries ridiculed the idea that soldiers should sit at tables with pens and paper, making plans. But the plans turned out to be a genuine advantage, and the next time the two nations fought, the Prussians won a resounding victory.
By World War I, everyone was planning. By World War II, military leaders had the bureaucratic skills for what has been called the most complicated logistical exercise in history: the invasion of Normandy. The Allied force of 160,000 that landed on the beaches wasn’t large by the standards of Napoleon, who had marched into Russia with more than 400,000 troops. But the operation was orchestrated so precisely that planners invented their own calendar for a landing on D-day at precisely H-Hour (1.5 hours after nautical twilight). The to-do list had detailed instructions covering the preparations (like the bombing runs on day D-3) and then the invasion itself. It continued all the way to day D+14, specifying where reinforcements would arrive a full two weeks after the beginning of the battle. The military planners’ confidence might have seemed presumptuous to Napoleon, but their success raised everyone’s faith in their powers.
After the war, corporate America had new planning heroes, like the Whiz Kids, a group of World War II veterans who reorganized the Ford Motor Company. Their leader was Robert S. McNamara, who before the war had taught accounting at Harvard Business School. He
To reach a goal, how specific should your plans be? In one carefully controlled experiment, researchers monitored college students taking part in a program to improve their skills at studying. In addition to receiving the usual instructions on how to use time effectively, the students were randomly assigned among three planning conditions. One group was instructed to make daily plans for what, where, and when to study. Another made similar plans, only month by month instead of day by day. And a third group, the controls, did not make plans.
The researchers felt they were on solid ground in predicting that the day-by-day plans would work best. But they were wrong. The monthly planning group did the best, in terms of improvements in study habits and attitudes. Among the weaker students (though not among the good ones), monthly planning led to much bigger improvements in grades than did the daily planning. Monthly planners also kept it up much longer than the daily planners, and the continued planning thus was more likely to carry over into their work after the program ended. A year after the program ended, the monthly planners were still getting better grades than the daily planners, most of whom by this point had largely abandoned planning, daily or otherwise.
Why? Daily plans do have the advantage of letting the person know exactly what he or she should be doing at each moment. But their preparation is time-consuming, because it takes much longer to make thirty daily plans than a broad plan for the month without any daily details. Another drawback of daily plans is that they lack flexibility. They deprive the person of the chance to make choices along the way, so the person feels locked into a rigid and grinding sequence of tasks. Life rarely goes exactly according to plan, and so the daily plans can be demoralizing as soon as you fall off schedule. With a monthly plan, you can make adjustments. If a delay arises one day, your plan is still intact.
The most extensive experiments in fuzzy-versus-fussy planning have been the uncontrolled ones run by military leaders on the battlefields of Europe. Napoleon once summarized his idea of strategic military planning: “You engage, and then you wait and see.” By making contact with the enemy and then improvising, he triumphed and made his armies the envy (and the scourge) of Europe. His rivals to the north, the Prussians, groped for some advantage to make sure they didn’t keep losing to the French, and they came up with more planning. The officer class of other countries ridiculed the idea that soldiers should sit at tables with pens and paper, making plans. But the plans turned out to be a genuine advantage, and the next time the two nations fought, the Prussians won a resounding victory.
By World War I, everyone was planning. By World War II, military leaders had the bureaucratic skills for what has been called the most complicated logistical exercise in history: the invasion of Normandy. The Allied force of 160,000 that landed on the beaches wasn’t large by the standards of Napoleon, who had marched into Russia with more than 400,000 troops. But the operation was orchestrated so precisely that planners invented their own calendar for a landing on D-day at precisely H-Hour (1.5 hours after nautical twilight). The to-do list had detailed instructions covering the preparations (like the bombing runs on day D-3) and then the invasion itself. It continued all the way to day D+14, specifying where reinforcements would arrive a full two weeks after the beginning of the battle. The military planners’ confidence might have seemed presumptuous to Napoleon, but their success raised everyone’s faith in their powers.
After the war, corporate America had new planning heroes, like the Whiz Kids, a group of World War II veterans who reorganized the Ford Motor Company. Their leader was Robert S. McNamara, who before the war had taught accounting at Harvard Business School. He
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