Transcript
Speaker: When I was a small child, I used to every New Year's take a big A3, write down what my intentions for that year were and hope that I could stick to them.
Speaker: I mean, the feeling of having that vision in front of me, it was truly exhilarating on that night of New Year's.
Speaker: But inevitably, what always used to happen was that just a few weeks into the year, for some reason, I never really went back to that paper.
Speaker: And I could never fully understand why that was happening.
Speaker: I always thought that maybe I didn't set high quality enough, like my goals weren't of high enough quality.
Speaker: Maybe I just didn't have the willpower.
Speaker: Maybe I was, maybe I was destined to be lazy.
Speaker: But eventually I figured out that the real reason was that the things that I wrote down on that piece of paper, and it was a literal paper, an A3 paper, things that I wrote down were simply not relevant anymore.
Speaker: Yes, especially as a young child, at the beginning of the year, things that you think you're going to do, some of them may stick.
Speaker: So let's say if you have a goal of going to the gym every day, that could stick.
Speaker: And that could be something that you wish to pursue for the whole year.
Speaker: But if you go to any level of detail, the idea that you have for the coming year is bound to change, is bound to not be absolutely correct.
Speaker: You can never foresee one year into the future exactly.
Speaker: And what the problem was, was that after just a few weeks of me writing down those new year resolutions on a piece of paper, I inevitably realized that they had become out of date.
Speaker: And this was, I realized this subconsciously and I simply didn't want to go back to that paper where I had written down my resolutions.
Speaker: Because there was something there that maybe was a thing that I wanted to achieve now in some other form still, but it just wasn't fully relevant anymore.
Speaker: My circumstances had changed.
Speaker: My understanding of the world had changed.
Speaker: I had learned and I no longer wanted the exact things in that exact way as they had been written down on that paper.
Speaker: Now, the problem with pen and paper is that you never
Speaker: can change things easily.
Speaker: Yes, if you write with an actual pencil, you can use an eraser and try to maybe do some corrections one or two times, but that is extremely limited.
Speaker: And after having invested so much time and effort into making this beautiful paper where I wrote down my resolutions and connected them to each other and gave them priorities, and even wrote down how many hours I wanted to spend on them in a given day or week,
Speaker: Going back there and realizing that I had to, in order to have it up to date, every few weeks, redraw the whole thing, the level of effort, honestly, it scared me and it put me off of planning.
Speaker: And it made me leave that paper somewhere hidden in the bottom of the drawer just out of the fear of what effort I had to put in again if I were to bring it out.
Speaker: And now this problem actually is very relevant to a lot of people who plan because one big objection to the question of why plan or why use any special tools to plan is either that there's too much uncertainty in life for planning to be worth it.
Speaker: Or if people say that they would prefer to not use any special tools to plan, they just say, ah, I can just use good old pen and paper.
Speaker: But I would actually say that the questions of whether planning is worth it, despite life's uncertainty and whether you should use special tours to plan are extremely connected.
Speaker: You should use special tours to plan exactly because of life's uncertainty.
Speaker: And now, Sebi, why don't you, why don't you tell me and us a bit more about how exactly those two questions are connected?
Speaker: Well, I think it's about understanding
Speaker: I think the first way to deal with the concern of, oh, why don't I just plan on pen and paper?
Speaker: I think it's about understanding yourself and understanding the nature of the world in which you live.
Speaker: So we've touched upon this.
Speaker: The world in which you live is uncertain, it's dynamic, and it's masked by continuous change.
Speaker: Not only will external factors in your external environment change,
Speaker: which may yield any sort of plans that you had invalid, right?
Speaker: Maybe you end up breaking an arm, breaking a leg, something happens to someone in your family, and that physically prevents you from doing something.
Speaker: Or perhaps your own understanding of what you want changes.
Speaker: And so that's one thing, that's about understanding the nature of the world.
Speaker: But I think the reason why a lot of people struggle with pen and paper, and I think you raised this quite well in your personal anecdote, a lot of the reason why people actually blame themselves, they think, oh, maybe I'm just destined to be lazy, is that I think we need to understand our own nature on, and just be a bit more realistic about it, in that we are human.
Speaker: And this doesn't necessarily mean that
Speaker: we are destined to be lazy creatures.
Speaker: We're destined to have no motivation to do anything.
Speaker: But we must understand that motivation and the impetus to say, take your plan and take action upon it, or actually make the effort to revise your plan, is going to be subject to fluctuating motivation.
Speaker: And this goes down to
Speaker: an investment of time and investment of energy.
Speaker: And so the solution to all of this is having a system for planning that makes it as easy as possible to take that action of updating your plan, to take that action of, OK, looking at your goal, breaking it down, and then making the move to actually achieving it.
Speaker: So this is fundamentally why we need these tools, why these tools are so effective.
Speaker: Because yes, you could plan on pen and paper.
Speaker: I mean, I tried it myself.
Speaker: But the reason why I turned to, why I turned to actually making these tools was because I realized, oh crap, look, I'm not necessarily a lazy person, right?
Speaker: I just suffer from fluctuating motivation.
Speaker: When I'm tired, I can't be bothered to do something.
Speaker: So I need some sort of system that makes it so much more easy to do it.
Speaker: So that when I wake up in the morning, I don't think, oh,
Speaker: I don't think of, okay, I need to plan my day.
Speaker: I get a feeling of dread, a feeling of kind of, you know, the memories of all that time you spent investing, that your time you spent making all these plans, you know, those painful memories of the time you feel was wasted come back to you and you think about plan negatively.
Speaker: No, you want to think, oh, actually, this is quite good.
Speaker: I'm looking forward to it because I know that it will be a simple process.
Speaker: I know that I can plan and that I can get onto your day.
Speaker: So to answer your question, it's...
Speaker: to address the concern of why should we bother planning in life?
Speaker: You need to understand yourself and you need to understand your environment.
Speaker: And it is truly so important to realize that there is a difference between planning and planning.
Speaker: There is a difference between doing it the right way and doing it in a way which may seem like it is very beneficial, but it's simply not actually sustainable in the long term.
Speaker: And I feel like many of the people who say that they do not like planning or that they are for some reason averse to it or that they think that, oh, I'll just write some things down on pen and paper and not bother with building myself a proper system.
Speaker: They have been stung by doing it slightly incorrectly.
Speaker: The people
Speaker: The people who think that planning is something that pushes you into a box are very likely to not have put too much time into discovering just how colorful and how diverse the world of making plans is.
Speaker: There's so many possibilities.
Speaker: There are different methodologies, especially once you go into the corporate realm and you start looking at how teams plan their work.
Speaker: There's Agile, there's Scrum for software teams, there's Waterfall Planning, all these different methodologies.
Speaker: And yes, while maybe it can get overwhelming for people, the reality is that it's such a colorful world that simply writing down that there is a reason why there is more to planning and more to the world of planning than simply taking a paper and writing down some things on it with a pen.
Speaker: And that reason is that...
Speaker: Planning has to reflect life.
Speaker: Planning has to reflect life because we plan in order to make a change in life.
Speaker: And life is complex and life is dynamic.
Speaker: And for that reason, your plan also has to be to a decent degree complex and very importantly dynamic.
Speaker: You cannot have a plan that doesn't share the same qualities as the life that you are trying to make that plan apply to.
Speaker: Because life is dynamic and because life does have these complexities and because things do change in life, you need to have a plan that also facilitates that.
Speaker: Now, pen and paper, a plan that is written down on paper is extremely non-dynamic.
Speaker: The only way to keep changing that is to every time, especially if you have complexity in addition to this dynamic nature, if you have a plan that is both complex and dynamic, it is extremely hard to keep it up to date on pen and paper because one,
Speaker: In order to have a complex plan on paper, you need to draw or in any medium, you need to draw a lot of connections between different parts of the plan.
Speaker: That is what complexity is.
Speaker: It's the amount of different connections of different influences that different parts of the plan have on each other.
Speaker: And because you need to have all of these connections, the moment that you want to change something in that plan, when the dynamic nature of life comes in, in order to make that change, you would need to reorganize so many things because all of the things that are connected to the part of the plan that you want it to change now,
Speaker: also need to change in some way, either just because they lose a connection or maybe even reposition themselves in whatever structure that you're using to plan your life.
Speaker: If we think of a plan tree that we use here at WAI, where you have a goal at the top and it breaks down into branches of subgoals, then the moment that you think you realize that one subgoal no longer helps you towards another subgoal, but rather should fit in some other place in the tree, it may be beneficial to you to reorganize the whole layout of the tree.
Speaker: You cannot do that easily on pen and paper without
Speaker: drawing the whole thing again, which takes a significant amount of effort.
Speaker: And if doing something that you could do much easier in order to get the same results, for example, reorganizing your tree, if it takes you so much more time and effort, that simply means that you are not acting in a way that gives you high leverage.
Speaker: So Sebi, how would you explain the concept of leverage in this context?
Speaker: Yeah, so I'll start with just an example, right?
Speaker: Say you're a tennis player, right?
Speaker: And you want to improve your ability to hit balls, right?
Speaker: There are one of two things you could do.
Speaker: One is focusing on, say, output, right?
Speaker: And this would involve you practicing the drill of actually hitting the ball.
Speaker: So going out, going onto the court, and just doing rep after rep after rep.
Speaker: Right, that's one thing.
Speaker: But you could also sit down and engage in some research, study biomechanics, talk to your coach, talk to other professionals to understand the optimal technique for swinging.
Speaker: And so leverage is all about choosing the second option.
Speaker: It's all about investing in inputs that enable you to do the outputs better.
Speaker: So in this case, this would look like the tennis player
Speaker: not totally abandoning drills because drills are important, because we need to be able to produce some sort of output.
Speaker: We need to be able to practice things in the real world to achieve any sort of progress.
Speaker: But instead of just focusing on those, also thinking, okay, how can I improve my outputs?
Speaker: How can I improve my swinging technique so that
Speaker: I can actually hit the ball better.
Speaker: Because yeah, you do need to do... Most importantly, how can I improve the output that I get out of the same input of time and effort?
Speaker: That is what leverage is about.
Speaker: If you imagine a lever, you can either have a very short lever that you lift something with, which means you have to put a lot of strength into it.
Speaker: So you have to put a lot of effort to lift the same thing, to get the same output.
Speaker: If you have a long lever,
Speaker: That is what leverage is, right?
Speaker: If you have a long lever, you can do much less work, put in much less effort and be able to lift the same weight.
Speaker: And the same metaphor carries over here to your tennis example, because the tennis player has to learn how to hit the ball correctly if they want to get the most out of their practice and out of their play and out of their swing ultimately.
Speaker: Yeah, and I think actually, understanding, using this concept of leverage is another way in which you can address the concern of, oh, why don't I just use pen and paper?
Speaker: Because we must understand that the use of pen and paper is one system, right?
Speaker: It's one way in which you go about creating a plan.
Speaker: But then there are other ways.
Speaker: There are software-based tools, which we have at Wave, for example, which amount to another system.
Speaker: And so what these systems basically, they count as your inputs.
Speaker: They're the processes that you use to achieve your desired outcome, your desired outcome of having a plan, knowing what to do with your time today, and also perhaps your life more long-term.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: What it ultimately does come down to is having your plan be agile.
Speaker: And an agile plan is something that we did a full episode on, and we will link that in the description below.
Speaker: But to summarize, what an agile plan is, is a plan that is capable of constantly adapting to the changes that happen in the world around you.
Speaker: And your plan has to be agile because life is dynamic and changing, as I mentioned before.
Speaker: Now, if you wish to have an agile plan, it has a few key elements.
Speaker: An agile plan is able to learn from inputs and able to adapt to those inputs, the information that it gets from the external world around you, and is able to adapt to those inputs and become a better plan to learn from that experience as a result of being able to adapt to them.
Speaker: So if an agile plan has to be able to get input and to change according to that input in order to be always as up to date as possible, it needs to exist in a medium that facilitates easy change.
Speaker: And the quite obvious medium in our current modern world is the computer, is the digital realm.
Speaker: The digital realm allows for changes, for very, very complex changes to happen in an almost in an instant, in the blink of an eye.
Speaker: simply because information is so fluid if controlled in the correct way.
Speaker: This does, of course, necessitate the use of the proper tools, and that is exactly what we're building here at Way.
Speaker: We are trying to give people something that allows them to map out their plans in an information structure and in a tool that then allows them to make changes in a very agile way according to
Speaker: according to the needs and according to new information that comes in.
Speaker: So just to summarize, a plan needs to be dynamic and a plan needs to be able, it needs to be capable of changing and adapting to the world around it.
Speaker: This is the case because life is dynamic and life is constantly changing.
Speaker: And a plan also needs to be complex because life has complexities.
Speaker: So
Speaker: A plan needs to be dynamic and the plan has to have some complexities in order to reflect the life that you want that plan to apply to.
Speaker: If you want your plan to apply to that life in a good way, you need to facilitate the fact that your plan is able to have these things.
Speaker: You can only do that if you keep your plan and you build it in the proper medium, the digital medium, the medium that allows for information, which is what a plan consists of, to be easily reorganized and easily adapted to incoming things from the external world.
Speaker: That is the only way to have a plan that is optimally high quality and that is capable of adapting to whatever the latest circumstances are.
Speaker: But why is it so important to have a plan that is optimal in the first place?
Speaker: So, Sevi, could you just impact that statement for us?
Speaker: Why do we even need such a good plan?
Speaker: Well, I think it's all about whether you want to be moving in the right direction in the first place and whether you want to be moving in the right direction as effectively as you possibly can.
Speaker: So moving in the right direction in the first place, what I mean by this is it's...
Speaker: it's basically what a good plan will enable you to have, enable you to do.
Speaker: Because what a good plan will consist of is a bunch of goals which you have reflected upon and which you have thought, okay, are these really something that I want to achieve?
Speaker: Or rather, are they something that perhaps elements of my socialization make me think that I want to achieve?
Speaker: And so an effective planning process, a good plan, enables you to ensure that you're moving in the right direction by subjecting you to a process that has you reflect upon your goals, has you reflect on this direction.
Speaker: This is the type of process that we provide you at Way.
Speaker: And we'll link to an article in the description.
Speaker: But I think the second thing is...
Speaker: being able to move in that direction the most effective way possible.
Speaker: And I think this goes back to what we're talking about with regards to leverage, getting the most output with the smallest amount of input.
Speaker: In this case, the input is time and energy, and output is how close you get to achieving your goals, or perhaps on a more technical level,
Speaker: how much of a change in your state of being have you achieved, right?
Speaker: Because ultimately goals are just a state of, a desired state of being, right?
Speaker: And so whether you deem, I think it's quite intuitive because this point ultimately boils down to, do you think achieving more with less effort is good?
Speaker: is, I mean, that's what it ultimately bottles down to.
Speaker: And I think there's a reason why in say economics, this is an assumption, because I think that most people would deem that more with less, more progress, more fulfillment, more achieving of their goals with less time and energy spent is better.
Speaker: It is quite an intuitive argument.
Speaker: And we have talked about now what the problems with pen and paper are.
Speaker: And I would just like to summarize that and then reiterate what are the benefits of using a proper planning system like ways.
Speaker: So the first problem with trying to plan on pen and paper is that a plan on pen and paper is not dynamic.
Speaker: It is very hard to change it once you get new information, once you want to change where something in your plan is or how exactly it is, what exactly it is.
Speaker: When you want to change a part of your plan that is written down on pen and paper, you have to either redraw the whole plan or at best case, you can make fewer small changes.
Speaker: The other problem that links to this one is the problem of it not being able to be as complex.
Speaker: The problem with pen and paper is that once you start building that plan,
Speaker: Once you draw the first parts of the plan and you put them down on your paper, it is very hard to then later make changes, even if you don't get new information from the outside world.
Speaker: But just when you add new complexities into the plan, you want to add new connections.
Speaker: You want to draw another line that, oh, I need to do this first before I can do this.
Speaker: Once you want to add these complexities, if you have your plan on pen and paper, it is extremely difficult to reorganize things so that these connections are as easy to see and understand as possible.
Speaker: How does Way solve this by giving a software tool that allows for this proper mapping of different parts of your plan?
Speaker: Firstly, way deals with complexities by mapping them out in a very beautifully clear tree structure where the goal is at the top of the tree and the branches are the sub goals, the things that you need to do first, then a little milestones that you need to achieve before you can go and achieve that big goal of yours.
Speaker: This allows for the complexity of achieving any big goal to be understood in a beautiful visual structure that not only brings the psychological benefits of our brain being able to process visuals in simply 13 milliseconds,
Speaker: but also just allows you to map, to keep the whole information complexity of all the little things that it takes to achieve a big goal in one place in front of your eyes at the same time, without having to go through different folders and different files to find it or different papers even.
Speaker: And secondly, the benefit of your plan being dynamic way is agile.
Speaker: And we've talked about this in a previous episode and we will link to the part of our ultimate planning guide that talks about this as well.
Speaker: But what being agile means, what being dynamic means is that a plan built in Way is always ready for change.
Speaker: It is changes built into how we build plans because what we do here at Way is we build plans that have a constantly growing level of abstraction and or you could call it shrinking depending on which way you look at the plan.
Speaker: But basically a Way plan, a good plan.
Speaker: has the things that are further along in time, the things that you are thinking of doing or achieving in one year, two years, or even more from now, described less specifically than the things that you're working on right now.
Speaker: Why is this?
Speaker: Because time is the greatest creator of uncertainty.
Speaker: As time goes on, as you look further and further into the future, you can be less and less certain that the things that you plan for that time are going to happen exactly how you think they will right now.
Speaker: But the things that you're working on right now, you have a pretty good understanding of.
Speaker: For that reason, a way plan encourages you to always have the higher up sub goals, the things that you're going to achieve in a long time from now, quite abstractly defined.
Speaker: And as you move down the levels, as you break them down into smaller and smaller steps until you get to the actions that you can take today to move closer to your goal, that's when you get specific.
Speaker: What this allows for is it allows for easy swapping out of things,
Speaker: further and further into the future because you haven't put too much effort into defining them with information that you know will probably change.
Speaker: So this, I would say, is a summary of why it makes a lot more sense to use software-like way tools that allow for dynamic and complex planning because it simply reflects the reality of life better than pen and paper.
Speaker: And Seve, do you really think that you can live your life your way if you have a plan that doesn't reflect the reality of life?
Speaker: No, not at all.
Speaker: You cannot.
Speaker: And what we're about here is, of course, you living your life your way.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: That's it for this week.
Speaker: Thank you very much for listening.
Speaker: Be sure to check out our social media pages and website links in the description for more on how you can live your life your way.
Speaker: Also, if you thought that you gained something from this episode, whether it be a small insight or transcendental reality-shaping piece of enlightenment, then feel free to share this episode with your friends, family, whoever it may be, for there is no better gift than that of a good idea.
Speaker: Thank you very much, and I'll see you next week.
