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I often tell folks
that schools teach bad habits as well as good ones.

For one thing, your typical college course
habituates students into believing that everything consists of neatly packaged
problems that they can be graded on. 
Is that how people are evaluated in the real world?

Similarly, most college courses teach students to cram random bits of
information into their heads at certain intervals so that they can pass big
bang tests.  Is that how projects and breakthroughs succeed in the real world?

What is the actual
value of trying to memorize everything? 
Can we actually memorize everything we need to know?  I
think the answer is clearly no, or else search engines like Google
wouldn't exist.  Would you rather have access to your own memory for information, or access to Google?

Schools assume you
have all the information you need available to you.  Schools assume you
should be able to perform tasks and recall information without referring to a
book.  These assumptions are simply not correct. 
Perhaps that's why there's no shortage of stories of people who did well
in school but didn't in the real world, and vice versa.  The correlation is there, but it's not in
lock step like it should be.

Real life, of
course, is not simple.  Problems don't
fit into neat testable boxes.  The
information you need probably isn't in a book on your desk.  Sometimes problems solve themselves without
you even needing to lift a finger.  And
other times, the solution itself becomes unnecessary.

So, with that in mind, here are some questions I often ask when deciding when to stop planning and start acting.
 

What is the cost of
failure?

Failure has a rather
negative connotation associated with it in our society.  Nobody likes to fail.  However, it only takes a single flash of
insight to realize that it is not failure that one should be afraid of, but
rather the cost of that failure. 

Failure doesn't feel good to most people.  However, the amount of
planning you perform before acting should be roughly proportional to the actual cost of failure
and not to any psychological hang-ups related to failing.

Can the cost of
failure be lowered?

You will find that,
most of time, the cost of failure is negligible.  However, when failing is expensive, that's when you will
need to be on your toes.

When encountering a situation where failure will hurt, it's important to understand that you have two variables to
work with.  The first is to plan
more.  The second is to reduce the cost
of failure.  Call it the "walk before you run" strategy.

Reducing the cost of
failure has advantages over simply planning more.  Changes in the
problem to be solved or project priorities can quickly invalidate even the best laid plans.  Most importantly,
planning lacks a direct connection with reality.

The great takeaway here is that there are often ways
to reduce the cost of failure without changing the nature of what needs to be
done.  For example, releasing a buggy
software product can easily kill a company. 
However, if you restrict the releases of a product to a smaller
group of
users who are willing to deal with problems and provide feedback, you
locate more bugs but affect a much smaller subset of people who are
also more tolerant of those bugs.

Simple
changes in process like this can easily mitigate huge amounts of risk
at a fraction of the cost.  Try doing anything once or twice before you
do it a thousand times.  It's simple advice, in theory, but you'd be
surprised how often people still don't follow it.

What have you
learned?

The second important
point, after acting, is that you have to learn from what you've just done.  You might think that this is patently
obvious…after all, who does something and doesn't learn from it afterwards?  Trust me, people and teams repeat mistakes more often than you think.

In many cases, it's
simply enough to make a mental note and move on.  You're either the type that takes something
away from the process or you aren't. 
Unfortunately, I don't believe I can offer specific advice on how you
become the type of person that learns from everything happening around him.  So we'll move on.

However, as tasks
become larger in scope, the correct takeaway does become more specific.  I think that it probably comes as no surprise
to you that memories are quite fallible.  In software development, for example, an engineer often writes code to automate
all the little things that previously had to be performed by hand in order to
accomplish a task.

While writing code
to automate tasks is somewhat beyond the reach of most people, creating
checklists isn't.  In fact, writing
everything down that you have to do is one of the core tenets of the popular
Getting Things Done system.  If an activity seems to occur often, something anyone can do is create checklists.  That speaks directly to the entire point of acting quickly, which is to expose new information, remember it, and feed it back into the process as soon as possible.

Summing up

So there you go…three simple questions that tell you when to get over your "analysis paralysis" and get on with it.

I've
done a lot of background chatting here on the topic of planning vs
action, so let's wrap this up by summing up the general strategy.  My
general opinion
on deciding to act is as follows.  Most
of the time, the cost of failure is cheap or can be made cheap.  In these cases, you should favor a very brief
period of planning, followed by immediate action.  Make
sure to write down things as you act so that you retain the extra knowledge and
experience for the next run.

Everybody has to get things done.  That's just a fact of life.  However, how you go about getting things done varies tremendously from person to person.

You might say that every time we do something, it consists of two simple phases…planning and action.  You could also say that, in essence, each person cycles through these two phases hundreds of times a day.  Figuring out when to correctly transition from planning to action, then, has got to be pretty important, considering how often the cycle is repeated.

Planning is a vital activity.  It basically consists of researching all your available courses of action, considering various outcomes and trying to predict what will happen, and eventually committing to one of the available choices.  It's obvious, of course, that one has to eventually move out of the planning stage to get results.

Action is vital as well.  After all, nothing happens if you don't take action.  Since there are typically many more ways to do things incorrectly than correctly, you don't want to simply shoot off without any planning whatsoever.

Action, however, has some inherent advantages over planning.  The first advantage is that many people simply learn better in context, while acting, than they do out of context.  The second, and likely the most important, advantage is the fact that action is simply what Scott Berkun refers to as a forcing function.  Me, I just call it a type of reality check or a way to reduce risk.

Let's divert for a second.

Psychologically, humans are not objective creatures.  This fact alone is worth burning into your brain.  You are not objective.  Worse yet, you aren't even wired to realize that you are not objective.  For example, within any company, roughly 75% of the people rate themselves as above average within that company.  In a survey of drivers in Europe, 90% of the drivers rated themselves as above average drivers.  These perceptions are not based in reality.

A forcing function or reality check, then, is some sort of action or process that cuts through subjectivity and exposes reality.  It's a crucial step in any important project.  If you leave these until the end, you're likely to get lots of nasty surprises.

OK, now let's get back to the point.

When activities are disconnected from reality, the return on investment in those activities drops off because the risk of those activities being correct begins to outweigh the incremental benefits of additional activity.  It's analogous to making a bullet fire faster or do more damage when it's not even aimed at the target.  Or looking at the butterfly you can see through your window when there's an elephant hiding behind the wall.  Because planning is significantly more disconnected from reality and rooted more in our subjective perceptions, it is inferior in many ways to simple action.

Now, some of you are probably thinking "This is crazy…planning more is clearly the best thing to do in many situations."  You're not insane…this is absolutely true.  Up to now, we've basically ignored the issue of cost.  Since action often costs more, and planning frequently costs much less, planning more can often be the most cost-effective approach.

Pay attention here, because this is the important part.  The decision of planning vs action is based on the cost of both activities plus the fact that action is a much better reality check and experience builder than planning.  The trap many people fall into is generalizing their approach into "planning is always good" or "acting is always good".  Perhaps it's personality issues that determine where people tend to fall on this issue or a faulty assumption that what worked once should work again…but regardless, the correct approach to a situation isn't determined by personality.

If you act too much, you incur a lot of costs associated with a lot of misfires.  If you plan too much, it costs you valuable time, money, and magnifies the risk involved with not taking action to get a reality check on your assumptions.  Deciding how and when to do both is simply an issue of cost and risk.

In general, from my experience, the usual best approach involves

1. A minimal and considered amount of planning.  The 80/20 rule means you probably want to do a small amount of preparation.
2. A lot of action intended to force reality to the surface.  This is because there are usually courses of action which are fairly cheap reality checks or costs you would have to incur anyway.  You just need to bother looking for them.  Once you realize that the decision is based on cost and risk factors, you know how to look for and spot opportunities.

The most interesting situations are where the exceptions to these guidelines appear.  So, in my next post, I'll present some simple questions to ask when you're trying to figure out how much you should plan before acting.

Thanks for reading!

Well, that’s an interesting title for an article.  While I’m at it, I’ll advise you to eat less.  And make more money too.

Actually, odds are that if you are reading this blog post you probably read pretty quickly already.  But there are some people who don’t…and for them, I’d imagine the information here can make a huge difference.

Reading is probably the fastest way we have to take in large amounts of information.  The words in a book may not resonate with you in the same way that a presentation or speech might, but if you are prepared to make sense of what you are reading, it is undoubtedly the most effective way to learn….faster than listening or sitting in a lecture, for sure.

One thing you’ll also notice in the biographies of really successful people is that they read.  A lot.  Incessantly, in fact.  Just a good data point to have, I think.

First of all, why not try taking a reading speed test and see how you do?  You might find the results interesting.  In case the pressure affects your reading style, you might try timing yourself as you read a book or have someone time you.  A good long chapter in a book will generally give you time to zone out and not worry about being timed.

Now that you’ve done that, let’s talk about the “right” and “wrong” ways to read.

Ineffective reading generally consists of the reader saying each word to himself as he reads. This is called subvocalization, and if you are hung up in this pattern of behavior, you have a maximum reading speed of around 100-150 words per minute. The ineffective reader also tends to focus on each single word in a single line as he proceeds across and down the page.  The reader is focused more on the mechanical process of reading than treating it as an invisible step between himself and the ideas on the page.

Effective readers use a different approach.  They don’t see words on the page; they see phrases and paragraphs.  Their field of vision is taking in about 10 lines at any moment in time.  They are not hearing the words in their head completely in their head or reading them back to themselves.  Rather, they are actually rapidly visualizing the concepts of the text as they proceed down the page.  On average, these folks are reading anywhere from 250-500 words per minute.

Effective readers can also skim information extremely rapidly.  When one tries to find a piece of relevant information, it often is not necessary to read everything in detail.  In such cases, your words per minute can easily rise into the thousands if you are able to scan quickly and pick relevant phrases out of the page as you scan.

Now, I’m not sure I can offer much better advice on this topic than what’s out there on the Internet.  The reason I point this whole topic of reading out is that if you happen to recognize your own style of reading as being in the former camp, this post should be helping you realize that you might be able to learn how to read more effectively, starting with some of the points above.  And if you recognize yourself in the latter camp…well, at least you know more definitively where you stand. Nice to know when you’re doing something right, isn’t it?  =)

It is very difficult to overstate the relative benefit that a person gains when he is able to take information in more quickly.  It’s something that will, like interest, multiply its effects upon you for the rest of your life.  So I’ll leave you with the following link, and a suggestion to use Google to read up on the topic a bit more when you finish with that. =)

Wikibooks article on speed reading