I generally think in terms of a planning horizon that doesn’t extend out much past 18 months. Typically things change fast enough that planning out past that far towards anything specific is not worthwhile, besides a few exceptions, and even those exceptions I can think of involves short-term actions that can’t be well planned out far in advance.
Generally I’m just thinking about how to get through the next minute. There’s some day-level and week-level planning along the lines of oh the weather will be nice this day and bad that day and I have more meetings this day than that day, and it’s often necessary to make plans a few months in advance for things like vacations and conferences and to think about vaguely what I might like to be working on next, but often there’s just not enough information to do more than try to point myself in vaguely the right directly.
I think the biggest driver of this for me is just being able to adjust to things that are uncertain now, including unknown uncertainty. Because I don’t actually know what things will be like in a minute, a day, a week, a month, or a year from now, and my ability to predict what it will be like decreases in accuracy as time extends, I find it’s mostly a bad strategy to try too hard to plan or set specific goals.
So instead I mostly have to make decisions based on what I might call virtue, i.e. does this seem like the kind of thing I would like to do and have done? Will I still feel that way about it later? Will it push me vaguely in the direction of things I would like, or will it work against that?
I’m not sure the world is certain enough to do much more.
I generally think in terms of a planning horizon that doesn’t extend out much past 18 months. Typically things change fast enough that planning out past that far towards anything specific is not worthwhile, besides a few exceptions, and even those exceptions I can think of involves short-term actions that can’t be well planned out far in advance.
Generally I’m just thinking about how to get through the next minute. There’s some day-level and week-level planning along the lines of oh the weather will be nice this day and bad that day and I have more meetings this day than that day, and it’s often necessary to make plans a few months in advance for things like vacations and conferences and to think about vaguely what I might like to be working on next, but often there’s just not enough information to do more than try to point myself in vaguely the right directly.
I think the biggest driver of this for me is just being able to adjust to things that are uncertain now, including unknown uncertainty. Because I don’t actually know what things will be like in a minute, a day, a week, a month, or a year from now, and my ability to predict what it will be like decreases in accuracy as time extends, I find it’s mostly a bad strategy to try too hard to plan or set specific goals.
So instead I mostly have to make decisions based on what I might call virtue, i.e. does this seem like the kind of thing I would like to do and have done? Will I still feel that way about it later? Will it push me vaguely in the direction of things I would like, or will it work against that?
I’m not sure the world is certain enough to do much more.