Failing to plan is planning to fail
Yesterday we saw India vs Usa and honestly Usa played extremely well. Better than what I thought at least. One thing that I really liked about their team was planning and how well planned they were in executing their plans. For example, getting the wicket of Abhishek Sharma in the very second over and the first ball of Abhishek Sharma was brilliant. I think they analysed the game really well and that helped them.
We could clearly see the thought process of having fielders located at certain places and bowling according to the fieldset. It was brilliant to see that. The thing that distinguishes USA and other small teams was one word. Planning. Planning is equally important as the execution. The difference between USA and other teams is that the players in USA are extremely intelligent, they plan really well outside of the field and play the game through strategy rather than through brute.
Men have been responsible for the structure
For thousands of years now, men are the ones who are responsible to hold structure. That is holding structure even on the worst days. In order to hold the structure, men are also very much responsible for planning and strategising. The more you spend time planning, the easier it is to execute and hold structure. So one should spend decent amount of time planning. To take the cricket example and apply it to general planning and strategy is the goal of this post.
Strategy
a high-level, long-term plan designed to achieve specific goals under uncertainty, focusing on "where to play and how to win"
- That's how google define strategy. So strategy is a high level, long term plan. Which means that right now we do not focus on the details. It's simply the high level.
At this stage in our current example, Usa might have thought of the higher level, a bird's eye view of how Abhishek Sharma scores his runs in the powerplay. Let's have fielders there. That's it. No details about the how yet. Just a high level view of the game.
Plan
the fundamental process of thinking about, organizing, and defining the actions, resources, and timeline required to achieve a specific goal.
- That's how google defines plans. It's the fundamental process of thinking. Defining Actions. Resources. Timeline.
This in our example means, the how to. Which bowler should bowl to Abhishek Sharma. Which line and lengths to bowl to Abhishek Sharma. What kind of field to sets for him. All of these things are plan. Here we go into the detail. For now, let's focus on one example of simplicity and then we can generalise for further examples.
How much time should one spend on planning the day, planning the week, or planning the month. If you ask me, you should spend at least 1 hour for planning everything. When you are planning the month, you are going to be more structured and thoughtful with your execution. You will be doing things with intention rather than hurried things. You will work on things that are important to execute according to a strategic roadmap. If you do not have a roadmap of where you are going, there will be literally no way in your to go. For example, even with google maps, we need to know where we are headed towards and then we navigate right. We cannot really navigate any other way. It's all done through plan.
Learn to plan and strategise
I do not think there's a right way and a wrong way out here. For different people, different types of planning methodology works. However, the way I like working is having a multilevel plan. That is to have a one month plan, a quarterly plan and then a yearly plan. That's how we can view long term goals out here.
There are some other people worth mentioning. Cal Newport for example believes in daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly plans. He does not plan for a year. To me that makes sense. One has to work towards their ultimate Northstar in the next 3 months.
Whiteboarding
I really enjoy doing white boarding. I think white boarding is one way where we can understand our goals and move forward in that direction. The more we understand white boarding the better we will be. So one needs to be doing white boarding while planning anything in life. You might also want to cut do a haircut for your upcoming meeting. You might also want to talk about something else. You might also want to work on getting things done. You might want to increase your weight all of that results will come from a good effort in planning. If you don't plan, you will lose badly.
Plans need to update
Imagine you are playing a cricket game and one batsman is now understanding your plans and playing accordingly. For example, if you plan to bowl short and the batsman is now aware and is stepping out to get make sure he can hit it in the V, you need to update your plan now. You need to surprise the batsman more often. You need to get into his head. The more you get into this phase where you are planning well, you will be able to plan and effectively make changes. So what I am trying to say is that according to the situation, make sure you update your plan. Take time to make the plan well, but don't be afraid to update it as well.
Growth
Growth needs to be continuous. If you need to understand or update your knowledge on a particular topic, don't be afraid to solve that problem. Keep learning something while others are talking on teams or slack. The more you learn, the less afraid you will be to face challenges as they come in. So grow in a way that's responsible. Grow in a way that helps you update your knowledge all the time. Make videos on software. Understand the concepts well. Go in the depth of each topic. That's where insights really live.
Lift others
We lift ourselves by lifting others. This is quite an important part of growth. When you are working, you are working really well. You are lifting yourself up. You are first trying to solve the problems that you have. Now once you have some time, you will need to develop others as well. That's the work of a software engineer. When you start developing others that's when they will help you. You should help them in order for them to help you. So keep challenging yourself and keep getting better. It's hard to be in discomfort but stay with it. Learn with it. No need to show off in instagram. But make sure you plan everything out. There should be nothing that you should not have a plan of. Plan A, Plan B, Plan C are all important part of the process.
Planning document
How do you make a planning document or rather let's call it a blue print? How do you really make it? I believe that somewhere down the line, you should be starting with the goals and the outcomes of the whole project. Maybe having a PRD for that.
Once you have jotted down the goals and outcomes, you will need to know the milestones for each of these things. For example, you want to win a match of cricket. It means that you need to take the wicket of Abhishek Sharma, Ishan Kishan, etc. and the overall goal is to restrict the scoring to 150. Suppose if we have that particular choice. Once we have that in mind, we will try to have our bowlers do a plan for each of the batsman they are facing. Once that's done then you try and analyse how to make sure they score the least amount of runs. Now all of these are plans which are high level. Now for each bowler, they will have to give less than 30 runs.
150 means - 5 bowlers and 30 runs for each bowler. If each bowler gives less than 30 runs or close to 30 runs that's when 150 is a good score to restrict. This might change according to the conditions as well. But on a high level that's the idea. 30 runs for each bowler. Now each of these bowlers have to execute it according to their skill. They can also keep adding more skills to their repertoire.
Each bowler will have their own planning document. If you have all of thee in place, theirs a high chance that you will be able to achieve the goal that's required. You can also win the T20 World Cup if you do all of this. But skills are something that's essential to each and every bowler. If you keep bowling in right line and lengths you will win eventually.
Skill Planning Document
Now each of these planning documents should also have a skill planning document where you ask the individuals to keep increasing their skills at all points. For an example, someone like a frontend developer, needs to increase their skills of front end development everyday. They need to keep on learning new frameworks, new tools, new ways of doing the same things, etc. This will help them gain the confidence required to solve important problems. Remember the best part of life is problem solving. For problem solving we need to have great skills. Once we bank on those great skills, we will be able to develop such skills that are out of the world. I have also seen that Claude is very good at coding. The more we use Claude the better. That's the skill of utilising AI at work. But the fundamental skill of coding is very very important. Eventually we will have AI take over certain things but it's still very difficult to manage such types of agentic development. What I want to say is that you should have your skill planning documents as well, that adds more and more skills to your repertoire. More importantly, one should understand these skills with such great amount of depth.
Execution
The final step of all these is execution. One thing is you want to understand the concepts. Gain the skills required to succeed at your work. But then the final thing that hits right there is execution. When you are executing, you are going to have the highest chances of success. Moreover, you need to execute so well that there is literally no end to the growth you can have. If you are executing, it means you are developing your skills as well and you are making contributions to the world as well. We need to centre ourselves around contribution as we have spoken earlier.
Marketing/ Promotion
For all of us as individuals we are a great product ourselves. But if a great product is not advertised and people do not really know about the product, they would never use that product. So it's quite important to market and help people as well along the way. One effective thing that a friend taught me was that he created a small video on how to use an MCP server. That will help them develop some new skills. Now creating these small demo videos on how to understand agent identity and so on, you will know exactly, how to make these small professional videos.
Final Structure
- Plan
- Skill
- Execution
- Marketing
- Promotion
- Helping out other people
Conclusion
As I have said earlier, you need to plan and spend a good 1 hour at least for planning projects, thinking about the skill required, the execution that's required, the marketing and promotion that's required. All of these things help you develop a great thought process in developing a key idea of where the product is going. This also helps people view you as a someone that's resourceful and impactful for their work. It's very easy today with the help of an llm to ask llm make the document. However, it's quite a crucial time for us to also think and strategise in a way that's not written by llm. We don't want an llm to write a document. We want to write it ourselves. We want to understand it ourselves. That's the only way to have a unique value. The value you create is unique.
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