Renegade Yogi

The official ninja guide to minimalist planning

Planning judo

Planning is useful when you have a largish project that you can’t keep in your head. It helps you keep track of all of the stuff you have to do.

But something I often forget is that a plan can let you eliminate stuff that might not be necessary. See, the plan isn’t just to make sure you’ve got everything taken care of. It’s a way to model the steps you’re going to take before you take them so that you can manipulate them.

And that’s really powerful. It lets you make sure the steps in your plan are worth your while before you even do them. Yes, you have to use your judgment. And you might judge wrong. But it’s better to think and be wrong than to not think at all.

The takeaway

What follows is not a complete planning process, but rather a way to intertwine a minimalist perspective into your planning. These steps don’t have to be worked in the order given.

Next time you’re planning something, first thing’s first: make sure you know your objective. Why are you even doing this? What is the least you are willing to accept? This will establish a bottom line.

Then you plan out your subgoals. What things do you need to achieve to reach your objective?

After you’ve planned and you’ve got a list of subgoals, eliminate what is not essential. Try this: for each subgoal, ask this question: would the plan work without it? If it can work without it, perhaps you shouldn’t do it.

Now develop a plan of action for the subgoals you haven’t eliminated. For each step in the plan, ask this question: is there a cheaper or faster way to do this?

Ok, last one, and this one is a good one. Break the steps for each subgoal down even further into subsubsteps. Now perform the same elimination process to those substeps.

This should get your plan lean and mean.