It’s easy not to plan. We often put off planning our day, planning our week, and planning how we’re going to spend our money because we don’t think we can make a good plan. Instead, we muddle along with no plan, thinking “I’ll make a good plan soon.” This is a really bad place to be, because we can spend weeks, months, and even years thinking “I’ll make a good plan soon.

Consistency is a pillar of success in anything—staying in shape, learning calculus, taking bassoon lessons. You’ve got to do the work regularly to get any good. You need consistency. But not perfect consistency. Perfect consistency is a mirage, and when we plan on it, we sabotage ourselves. Highly productive people actually plan on a little failure. Take exercise, for example. Anybody can work out for a couple of weeks, but let’s say your kid gets sick in week #3 and you miss a couple of workouts.

It’s freshman orientation season at my university, which means I’m spending a couple days a week meeting one-on-one with incoming students and helping them choose classes for their first semester in college. Putting together one’s very first college schedule can seem daunting, and it’s interesting to observe students’ attitudes and demeanors during the meeting. Some are eager, others are subdued, a few have done extensive research and arrive armed with spreadsheets of their first, second, and third choices of each kind of course.

Here was the path to a “good career” thirty years ago: Go to college (maybe grad school too) Get a well-paying job Stay in that industry (maybe even in the same company) until retirement. Society was changing, but at a reasonable pace. Today, the world is changing so rapidly that it’s hard to keep up. Entire industries have been shelled to rubble by disruptive technologies, and many others are under siege.

At work, most of us spend lots of time on big projects with hazy parameters, faraway deadlines and many other people involved. A challenge with this kind of work is avoiding procrastinating on our little chunk of the project, and here’s a simple tactic that can help. Fighting procrastination When you’re working on something that you’ll submit to someone else when finished, commit to a public deadline. In other words, tell others exactly when to expect the finished product, even when you don’t have to.