The Importance of Writing Down Your Plan

People are often surprised when things don't go according to plan. In the web development world this may be a customer presentation, server maintenance gone bad or a dozen of other things. When this happens, it's not a sign of the world conspiring against you, but rather a sign of bad planning.

Any good plan should contain logical "what if" scenarios, where you try to identify things that could possibly go wrong - and ways to compensate for them or prevent them entirely. In the case of a presentation, what do you do if there is no projector? What if your computer breaks? What if the customer has questions that can't be answered by your presentation? These alternative scenarios create a number of different forks and bends that people are generally very bad at trying to predict and account for all at once. The solution? Write your plan down.

Writing a plan down gives a chance for review, introspection and thinking up additional scenarios while reliving you of having to remember everything you've thought of so far. It also makes it easier to share your plan with other people (also a good idea) and quickly recall all the details of your plan after a night of sleep.

So the next time life surprises you, instead of cursing your luck - take it as a wake up call to do a little more advanced planning next time. And be sure to write things down.