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Implementation intentions correct the planning fallacy

A to-do says what. An implementation intention says when, where and how.

“Write the proposal” is a task. “I write the proposal tomorrow at nine, at the kitchen table, before I open my mail” is an implementation intention. Gollwitzer named them in 1999, and the difference turns out to matter more than it looks.

Koole and van ’t Spijker found that people who wrote their plans this way completed more of them and were interrupted less often.

They also help with the planning fallacy: our habit of estimating how long something takes by imagining it going well. No traffic, no interruptions, no discovering halfway through that the file is somewhere else. Specifying the circumstances forces the obstacles into view before you commit to a time.

It costs about ten extra words per task. That is a cheap correction for a bias that has been wrecking estimates for as long as anyone has been making them.

Unplanned tasks get finished more often than planned ones

More from the same diary study. When the researchers looked at what people actually completed, unplanned tasks won.

Tasks that showed up during the day were rated as more urgent and more important than the ones people had planned in advance. And they were completed at a higher rate.

Recency bias and time discounting explain most of it. Something standing in front of you right now weighs more than something you decided was important last Thursday.

This undermines an assumption sitting under most productivity advice: that writing your priorities down protects them. It does not. Your plan gives you direction and an overview, and both are worth having. What it cannot do is win an argument with whatever just walked into your inbox.

Which means the plan needs something next to it. A protected block, a closed door, a rule about what you do before you open your mail. The list alone was never going to be enough.

Blind spots need someone else's eyes

Your brain filters everything through what you already believe. That is not a flaw, it is how perception works: experience and culture decide what registers and what slides past. The consequence is uncomfortable. Whatever sits outside your lens stays outside it, however honest you are with yourself and however long you sit with your journal.

We tend to treat blind spots as faults. Weaknesses to fix. In practice they are usually the opposite: strengths you never counted as strengths, patterns you have repeated for years, assumptions so obvious you never thought to question them. Opportunities in plain sight, invisible from where you stand.

This is the ceiling of solo reflection. You keep looking from the same position. Someone outside that position sees the shape of it. A coach, a colleague, a mentor. The reason is simple: they stand outside your lens.

It also says what coaching actually is, beyond the image of an expert handing out advice. A good coach tells you very little. They help you see what is already there and stays invisible from your own vantage point. The material is yours. The angle comes from somebody else.

And the moment you see it, something shifts. You stop reacting to your patterns and start deciding with them in view.

Urgency, not importance, decides what gets done

A diary study followed 29 research and development engineers through their working days. The finding that stuck with me: urgency predicted task completion far better than importance did.

Tasks that were both urgent and important got finished most often. Tasks that were only important, with no deadline pressing on them, were finished least often.

The statistics get stranger. On its own, importance had no relationship with completion at all. Once the researchers accounted for urgency, importance turned negative. Less important tasks were the ones that got done.

This explains a paradox I see in almost every effectiveness conversation. People end the day having handled everything that shouted at them, while the work that would actually move something forward sits untouched. It is not a character flaw. It is what happens when urgency is the only signal your day responds to.

So the question is not how to work harder on what matters. It is how to give importance a voice loud enough to compete.

The cheapest acquisition channel is the one you should start with

A services business wants to double its revenue, so it hires an agency to run paid ads. Six months and forty thousand euros later, it has twelve leads and one customer. Nothing was wrong with the ads. The order was wrong.

There are four ways to bring in customers. Inbound, where people find you through content, search and reputation. Outbound, where you go to them with cold email and calls. Paid, where you buy attention. And referrals, where your existing customers bring you the next one. Each asks something different from you before it returns anything: volume, margin, patience, or a base of happy clients.

Paid asks for the most. You are bidding against everyone else in your market, you need the margin to absorb a losing test, and you need enough traffic to know which test lost. Miss one of those three and the budget just leaves. Inbound asks for time instead, six to twelve months before it carries anything, after which the leads keep arriving without a price tag on each one.

Referrals ask for almost nothing you do not already have. That makes the order obvious once you see it. Start where you are already strong, build the channel that compounds, and only buy attention when you have the volume and the margin to survive being wrong about it.

The glass is already broken, and that is why I enjoy it

Fear of loss rarely comes from the loss itself. It comes from a quiet assumption underneath it: that the thing will stay. Give up that assumption first, book the thing as already gone, and there is nothing left to defend. What remains is what is in front of you.

Ajahn Chah made this concrete with a glass. He drank from it, enjoyed how it caught the light, and considered it already broken. So when the wind knocked it over, his answer was “of course”. The breaking was priced in from the start, which made every moment with the glass a gain rather than a postponement.

The Stoics arrived at the same place from another direction. Premeditatio malorum, and Seneca treating everything he owned as on loan.

Two things this is easy to mistake for. It reads like pessimism, until you notice the conclusion is presence: you still drink from the glass. It reads like permission to be careless, until you notice you still keep the glass away from the edge of the table.

That is the boundary. It works for impermanence, and it stops working for negligence. Where you actually have influence, “already lost” quietly becomes a way to write off responsibility.

The meeting ends the moment you share your screen

Something happens the moment someone shares their screen to walk through a presentation. Their face disappears. The other participants turn into an audience. The content plays out in a straight line instead of being worked through together.

From that point on the meeting is over as a conversation. What is left is a recording with witnesses.

Reading and interacting are two different activities, and they work badly at the same time. A video call is built for the second one: a small group, live, thinking out loud. If what you have is material to be read, send it up front as a memo or a short video. Then the meeting itself stays reserved for the part that genuinely needs everyone present.

Calling a meeting is a responsibility. You earn people’s attention by arriving prepared and by having the right people in the room. Slides on the screen are often how that preparation gets skipped: the deck carries the meeting so nobody else has to.

The test is simple. If your presentation survives being sent as a document, send it as a document.

Recognising information feels like knowing it, but it is a different cognitive operation from retrieving it

When you see a text a second or third time you recognise it, and that feeling of recognition is easily mistaken for actual understanding. This is the fluency illusion: the ease of processing something gets read as a measure of how well you know it. Rereading and highlighting raise how easy something feels right now (retrieval strength), but they barely build the deeper storage that remains once the text is no longer in front of you (storage strength). Take the source away, and the illusion of mastery collapses.

Passive techniques like highlighting and rereading feel productive precisely because they ask for almost no cognitive effort. You register that something matters, but that is not the same as integrating it into what you already know: explaining why it matters, saying it again in your own words, or finding it later without the text. Without that step you stay at the level of collecting information instead of building knowledge you can apply yourself.

The fix is not a better way of highlighting, but building in friction: forcing yourself to retrieve, explain or generate something without the source at hand. That feels harder and less successful in the moment, precisely because you can fail at it, and that friction is what leaves a lasting trace. The same illusion is not limited to studying: nodding along through a text or a codebase because everything feels familiar does not give you the ability to solve the problem yourself either.

Praise for rescuing keeps the dependency alive

You’re on holiday and something breaks at work. You drive back, you fix it, everyone applauds. And you feel it too: you were needed, and it worked.

That applause is where it goes wrong. Praise is a signal: it tells the whole organisation what actually gets rewarded. You learn that you’re the one who always shows up. Your team learns that the call is yours, not theirs. Your own boss learns that you’ll handle it.

This isn’t ego, or hardly ever. It’s identity. If you’ve been the reliable one for years, stepping back doesn’t feel modest. It feels irresponsible. Which is why deciding to delegate more isn’t enough on its own: you can tell your team to take more ownership and still sit on the context they’d need to act on it.

So prove your commitment some other way. Share context before there’s a crisis. Say out loud who gets to decide what. And next time, before you get in the car, ask your colleagues one question: what do you need to handle this without me?

Does your AI work for you or is it the other way around?
Whenever you’re pasting the output the AI gives you into another application, you’re just acting as a meat proxy (the next Times Word of the Year?).

By all means, prompt AI. But don't just relay the output. Read it, understand it, validate it, and then write a response in your own words (a decent certificate that you've done the prior steps). Making that effort is value you can add.