Stop Planning, Start Doing

Words < 783 – Read time < 4 min

I love to plan.

My calendar looks like a 🎄.

Notion, Todoist, fully organized, tagged, and color-coded. But there is one problem.

I can’t get things done with it.

To me, planning is the How to Survive a Bear Attack flyer you read before entering a forest:

Why it matters?

Planning is fragile.

Random events kill plans, yet we put planning on a pedestal.

We create frameworks, books, templates, and apps and glorify planning.

Now, it’s a breeze. Easy, colorful, looks good, and feels you’re in control. Unfortunately, the color-coded calendar you have full control over doesn’t accomplish anything on its own. It’s still just a plan.

Getting things done gets increasingly difficult each year.

Not only because Gemini now refuses to answer questions if you are under 18 to keep you safe but also because we have access to tools that can flood us with an indefinite amount of text or imagery.

Fifteen minutes of my writing flow are now generating the right image for these posts because apparently, Dall-e considered Godzilla walking outside while an engineer is working remotely from a cozy room unethical. 🤷‍♂️ So I have to tweak the prompt, then submit and wait.

Cutting useless activities was already difficult, but we made it a little harder.

That’s why I invite you to get something done.

Timebox the planning phase, and do it.

Deep Dive

You’re a software engineer, and you realize you’ve got plenty of things to try outside of work. A passion project like writing, a new framework, building a little application, or a full-blown SaaS, but you can’t get it done.

Planning should have exactly two steps:

1. make the plan and try to execute it

2. if you fail, break it up into smaller plans and do 1.

You’d be surprised how much you can achieve once you trash the idea of indefinite planning.

But let me show you a couple more examples

Software Engineering

Dave Cutler (Microsoft NT, XP, Azure Lead Dev) nailed this in the interview, quoting Fred Brooks (American computer architect, National Medal of Technology, and Turing Award winner) on what’s missing from today’s programming world: What Successful Programmers Do That Others Don’t: Dave Cutler.

Fred Brooks says there's thinkers and there's doers. He says thinkers are a dime a dozen. Everybody can think great thoughts, doers are rare, thinker doers are rarest.

But this problem is not exclusive to programming.

Creative work

This is the outline of the course I carefully prepared for days in 2021:

It has the title, the funny icon, and sections broken down into subsections. For some, I even planned how long they would take. Do you know how many copies I sold?

0 – I never shipped this course.

Planning can become your enemy within, working inside your brain, eating up all your time, and making sure your output remains a big fat zero.

Take Action

A month ago, I joined

Daniel Vassallo

at smallbets.com to help me ship infoproducts. It was a timeboxed course with limited time to think of a product, do market research, and execute. Here’s how it went:

• Market research ~ 1 hour

• Coming up with the idea ~ 30 minutes

• Plan the course lectures ~ 30 minutes

• Prepare coding lessons ~ 60-120 minutes

• Film the course ~ 12 hours

Because guess what?

The hard problems came up only when I was already in the recording and explaining the stuff.

Cutting the time spent planning helped me ship my first course roughly over a weekend. (btw if you’d like to check it out but can’t afford it, reply to this email, and I’ll send you a 100% discount).

What will you get done this week that you’ve been planning for so long?

📰 Weekly shoutout

1. You’re probably fetching some data from a CDN right now. But do you know how they work? Find out in Design a Content Delivery Network (CDN) from

   Eugene Shulga
   .

2. Tracking stuff is a great way to quickly see if you’re stuck in planning or if you’re actually doing something. Read 🔱 3+1 strategies to track your achievements from

   Fran Soto
   !

3. Feature flags are ruining your codebase, but you can do something about it. Read this great article from

   Anton Zaides
   on how to deal with feature flags!

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