Why I’m Not A Big Fan Of Five Year Plans

“I cannot always control what goes on outside. But I can always control what goes on inside.”
 — Wayne Dyer

Many people swear by making one-year, three-year, or five-year plans. They say these plans help them keep them on track for achieving their goals. They are able to refer back to the plans to compare where they are to where they should be and adjust course accordingly.

I don’t make plans like these for several reasons.

First, when you’re young (as many Medium readers are), it’s very difficult to predict where you will be in five years. When you are 45 years old, married, and have three children, and living in a house on which you have a mortgage, it’s very likely that in five years you’ll still be living in the same house, married to the same person, with the same children. When you’re 24, however, you tend to be single, living in a rented apartment, and still switching jobs (and even careers) fairly frequently. A year from now, I could be living in a different part of the country, working a different job, dating a different man, even living an entirely different kind of life. It’s hard to make long-term plans in those circumstances.

Five-year plans also don’t account for the unexpected, both positive and negative. A five-year plan wouldn’t have accounted for the $8,000 windfall I made on Medium in December 2019. If I had a five-year plan, I would have had to mark myself as “ahead” on my plans, even though those results weren’t solely caused by me. A five-year plan also wouldn’t have accounted for the pandemic, nor the vastly decreased Medium income that accompanied it. I would have had to mark myself as “behind,” even though, again, that was not solely on me. It reminds me of the serenity prayer:

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change; 
courage to change the things I can; 
and wisdom to know the difference.

Unexpected events, both positive and negative, are things I cannot change. Using them to assess my performance would surely drive me crazy. Instead, I assess my performance based on the one thing I can control: my actions.

I also think making plans is a waste of time. All the time you spend planning — that is to say, trying to predict a future you can’t control — can be spent doing the work. Trying to predict the future does nothing to change the future, but actually doing the work does. It’s a far more effective use of your time to only plan as much as is needed to figure out what to do next and then switch to doing.

I’m not the only one who isn’t all that excited about five-year plans. For the last few years, anti-goal and anti-plan sentiment has been rising in the self-help world. John Gorman published a story called “Stop Setting Goals” in February 2018, and PGSG’s own Todd Brison published “College Graduates, Stop Making Five-Year Life Plans” in August 2019.

Perhaps most famously, Dilbert creator Scott Adams claims you should have “systems, not goals.”

Many professionals believe that the key to success is goal setting, but Adams takes a different approach. The problem with goals, Adams says, is that they lock you into a mental model that can potentially set you up for failure.

“If your goal is to lose 10 pounds, you may wake up each day with failure in mind because the goal is hard to reach, and you are progressing only by small amounts,” Adams says. “It takes up all your willpower. I recommend that instead of a goal, you have a system.”

In the weight loss example, Adams says a person could instead spend time educating himself about choices, which gradually leads to selecting the right foods. Instead of striving for a goal, a person would then be arming himself with knowledge instead of relying on sheer willpower.

“Willpower is a finite resource,” Adams says. “Don’t pick a model that has failure built into it and requires that you constantly drain a finite resource.”

Dilbert’s Scott Adams on Why It’s Better to Have a System Than a Goal, Inc.com

For those who are pro-goal or pro-plan, the benefit of such a thing is that it is “motivating.” It’s like when you’re running a race and you’re near the finish line; it’s easier to push yourself to cross the finish line when you know where the finish line is. It’s a lot easier to run toward a finish line you can see than it is to run endlessly, never knowing where the finish line is.

I know from experience that’s true. When I make a plan for my weightlifting routine, as opposed to just “lifting until I’m tired,” I tend to lift more weight. But for me, that system tends to be beneficial only for short-term occasions like running a race or lifting weights. It does not always keep me motivated year after year.

Consider my old goal to make more than $1,000 per month on Medium for three months in a row. I found that goal fairly motivating because it was a simple goal to accomplish. All I had to do was write every day and publish in progressively larger publications. I woke up at 5 AM every day in order to make that happen, and eventually, it paid off. But even then, there were still periods of weeks and months when I was barely able to write even a single story. And now that I’m in a different part of my growth as a writer, I not only don’t find a Medium income goal motivating, I actively find it demotivating. Goals only motivate you when you know how to achieve them, and to be frank, I don’t know how to get to the next stage from where I am right now. Setting a financial goal right now will simply make me feel even more ineffective than I already do.

If you find goals or plans to be motivating for where you are at in your life right now, more power to you. But, I caution you against thinking of goals and plans as the ideal productivity tool.

Sometimes what you need is not a plan or goal. Instead of spending your time creating laborious plans, ask yourself what you can do today to move closer to your dreams. Then do it.

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