Planning has a confused and unearned stigma in the inventing and business world. Too often, we associate "planning" with endless meetings, compiling huge reports, and other sinkholes of wasted time. In the era of high-priced management consultants, "planning" becomes just another euphemism for goofing off. In the face of this nonsense, inventors and businessmen who know better instinctively reject this. Unfortunately, they run into the arms of something equally disastrous: leaping into a project with no planning whatsoever. Planning and scheduling has become something of a running joke as a result.

Technology entrepreneur and commentator Joel Spolsky remarks on this widespread phenomenon:
"Software developers don't really like to make schedules. Usually, they try to get away without one. "It'll be done when it's done!" they say, expecting that such a brave, funny zinger will reduce their boss to a fit of giggles, and in the ensuing joviality, the schedule will be forgotten.
Most of the schedules you do see are halfhearted attempts. They're stored on a file share somewhere and completely forgotten. When these teams ship, two years late, that weird guy with the file cabinet in his office brings the old printout to the post mortem, and everyone has a good laugh. "Hey look! We allowed two weeks for rewriting from scratch in Ruby!"

"Hilarious! If you're still in business."

Spolsky is right on the mark. A business that rejects all planning on principle will always be spinning its wheels, perpetually without direction in a sea of constant changes and gyrations. If you want to be successful, you should reject this approach in favor of a different one: a rational method of planning your actions.

This method consists of planning without letting planning take the place of action. For example, one rational way of planning is to allot a set day or time of the week for the making of plans for the following week. Beyond that clearly delineated time, however, planning will not occur. In this way, planning becomes one important yet small part of your life. It can therefore play its vital role in delivering you to success.

There are many reasons why this is the case. One is the inherent uncertainty of business ventures. Let's say you are planning on rolling out a new invention onto store shelves 6 months from now. As it stands today, you have a completed product, but not much else. No price structure, no clue what type of packaging you will use, no contact with vendors or distributors. Do you really believe that diving headlong into the coming days and weeks with no plan of action is the best way to go? Of course not. But why not? Why are you absolutely certain that doing that would be detrimental to your success?

You know that it's dumb because it's better to be prepared than unprepared. The more you examine things in detail, the more obvious this becomes. Let's say you call up one of the buyers at your local Wal-Mart and arrange an appointment with them a month from now. Which option is more likely to make that meeting go the way you want it to?

A) Foregoing all planning and deciding to "wing it." Rather than put some time and thought into what you want to say or anticipating the very reasonable questions you know the buyer will ask, you ignore these things and reason that you will "somehow" pull it off.

B) You gather your partners around the table and grill each other about what direction you want this meeting to take. You nail down your cost structure, because you know the buyer will ask about it. You put some thought into your price points, because that will be a topic of discussion as well. By the end of the session, you are ready to present a united front and grab this meeting by the horns.

If you are an intelligent person, you know that option B is best. It forces you to plan out things that you really need to know anyway, whether this meeting was going to happen or not. It allows you to step away from the edge, to know with some certainty how you will proceed and make the life or death decisions that your business faces.

As you can imagine, a big driving force behind planning vs. not planning is your attitude. If you believe that things will somehow work themselves out in your favor regardless of what you do, you will probably reject planning as a waste of time. Conversely, if you accept cause and effect as a given and know that the only way to achieve success is to act, you will embrace planning as an effective way of forecasting your future actions.

Done correctly, each minute of planning saves two minutes in execution. For this reason, you should make it an indispensable part of your efforts.