Planning. We all have to do it to get by. A lot of us hate it. Many of us overdo it. Some of us are serial planners while others make a plan and then sigh as it slips past.

This post is for the planners who fail and the continual plan-adjusters. Some of the more successful planners might find it of interest, even if it only makes you feel better about your own relative prowess with the plan. It’s the first of a few on planning and this one’s about the PhD.

I guess you know there’s this thing called the planning fallacy. That’s when we make predictions about how much time something is going to take but underestimate the time. Sometimes what we are planning actually takes much longer to do than we thought. Our plan was wildly inaccurate. It gave us a false sense of being organised.