Photo by Hal Gatewood
How do you define planning? Some techniques we can use are to look at its opposite—a technique known as via negativa. Another technique is to look at something taken to an extreme. This technique is can be applied by thinking of a “worse case scenario”. We can think of this as via extrema.
How can this help us find a better definition of planning?
The Opposite of Planning—Via Negativa
We can narrow in on the definition of planning in terms of the opposite: You sit down at your keyboard for an hour and just start working without a thought as to what you want to get done in the next hour. At the end of the hour how will you won’t know if you achieved it because you never defined what it is. Thankfully, you’re blissfully unaware of this gap because you never thought to review what you did.
Planning Done Wrong—Via Extrema
Let’s now think about how we could do planning for our one hour work session, but take it to a bit of an extreme.
You sit down at your keyboard with one hour to go before lunch. You wouldn’t be so careless as to just start working, so you allocate the first 10 minutes to writing out your goals and filing them away in the appropriate place in your notes. You’ll be working on adding a new setting on the user profile for your app, then taking a look at a flaky test that’s been bothering you.
Your work goes smoothly and you add the new feature, complete with tests. However, it’s getting close to lunch time and you know you should take the remaining five minutes to write your review. No time for that flaky test!
By adding this extra planning and review, you got 25% less work done.
The idea of spending 15 minutes out of an hour on overhead seems a bit silly, but I’m sure there are developers reading this that would be delighted if they could actually spend 75% of their time coding. In fact, some studies show that few developers spend more than two hours a day coding.1
Planning Done Better
Let’s look at how we can spend that hour before lunch more effectively. Take a few seconds to think about what you want to get done before lunch: 1) add the new user profile setting; 2) fix that flaky test. If you want, jot down these two lines on a sticky note. When you get to the end of the session, make a quick mental note whether there’s anything to follow up on. That’s it.
You just reduced your planning and review time from 15 minutes to a minute or less. Be sure to casually mention to your boss that you “reduced pre-lunch session planning overhead by 93%.”
Work sessions, usually 30 minutes to 2 hours, don’t need a written out plan. You can get away with a quick mental plan in most cases. Keep in mind that this is possible because you will have a written out daily plan.
Your daily plan should also be as brief as possible to get the job done. What author Tim Ferriss refers to as the minimum effective dose.2 I often use a tiny 7cm x 10cm (3” x 4”) notebook to jot down the my priorities for the day.
Not sure whether paper is better for daily planning or if digital notes would work better for you? Run a trial for a week or two and find out.
Global Code Time Report — Antenna. (2026, August 04). Retrieved from https://antenna.dev/data/code-time
Ferriss, T. (2010). The 4-hour body: An uncommon guide to rapid fat-loss, incredible sex, and becoming superhuman. Crown Archetype.
