I think there's an overemphasis on planning in more and more detail. Some things are opaque at the point of making the plan. For example, some parts of a plan may require you do to things you don't know how to do. That breaks down into (1) find out how, and (2) do it. But you don't know what you're going to find, and what acting on you find will look like. (2) is opaque at the planning stage, and may not even exist if the answer to (1) suggests a different way of going about the parent goal.

Also, things can go wrong during execution. No complicated car repair ever goes exactly as the Haynes manual says, and for all the convenience of satnavs, you sometimes have to notice that it's sending you along a stupid route.

I recently had the goal of taking a piece of software I wrote in 100,000 lines of C++ and getting it to be callable from a web page, returning results to be embedded into the same web page, and running on a web server that it had never been compiled for before, starting from a position of knowing nothing about how to do dynamic web pages. It got done, but a plan would have looked like "1. Find a suitable technology for doing dynamic web pages. 2. Use it."

Full marks for the pep talk, but the prescription of "planning" is surely only part of what is needed. How would you handle the planning fallacy? I don't think "better planning" is the answer.

In the same way, if we want to achieve our goals, we’ll be looking for the best plan possible. A better plan is one that has a higher chance of getting us what we want. So, to solve complex, global problems, we’ll need a great plan.

How do you know those things that you claim in that paragraph?

Everyone that came before you who wanted to make a difference probably had a fairly good notion of what the problems were, but how many of them actually took the time to really research/create a strategy of what to do about it?

Marx did research and he had a plan of how to make things better. It turned out that trying to put that plan into reality didn't really turn the world into a better place. Hitler also had his masterplan.

In the later part of the 20st century there was the sentiment that this isn't a good way to do things.

Currently going about the process of marking my original draft with comments that everyone gave. Hopefully I can share a revised version in a week or so. Thank you all for the critique!

So, listing some reasons:

• reason: If you optimize you will miss all the truly important things!

• answer: well, just make them a priority to optimize for

• reason: but maaagic is wonder!

• answer: but real things are also wonder.

When thinking about my resolutions for this year, I realized that saying that I am going to do something doesn't solve the problem, unless I have a serious reason to think I really will do it. This had a major impact on my willpower and the way I have been considering it for the past week. For instance, I write down my goals, the way to achieve them and how I will implement them in my life.

Besides that, I mostly didn't do anything important though. But I am confident this common sense knowledge will make my life better.

Personal comment: I dislike the style of your writing. It's probably just me; but I found it difficult to parse. I think I probably write and read differently.

For example:

Personally, I believe mapping things out, writing things down, and general planning skills are super helpful. We’ll explore all those ideas eventually, but the point is that I find that these utilizing these skills allows me to optimize my task completion process– not only do I finish in less time, but the quality of work is also improved.

I would write as: Mapping things out, writing things down, and planning skills are super helpful. We will cover all these ideas later, but for now - utilising these skills allows me to optimise my ability to get done what I want to get done; to finish what I start. Not only do I finish in less time, but the final product is higher quality.

Or:

We can also divide actions into things we “have” to do (mandatory actions) and things we “can” do (voluntary actions). There are actions we have a choice in doing, and actions we may have less of a choice in doing. There is some overlap with the “fun” and “unfun” categories. Some mandatory actions are fun, some are unfun.

Voluntary activities can be fun or unfun, but I think most people would choose to do fun actions over unfun ones.

As:

We can divide actions into things we "must" do, (mandatory) and things we "want" to do (voluntary). There are actions we can choose to do, and actions we have less choice to do. There is some overlap with the “fun” and “unfun” categories. Some mandatory actions are fun, some are un-fun. Voluntary activities can be fun or un-fun, but for optional actions - people would choose to do fun actions over un-fun ones.

(I could make more examples; but I don't think it will show anything more)

I don't always like the metric of "have to", and when talking about mandatory actions; there is a big grey zone. for example it's mandatory that I breathe or I die, but you (and most people) probably consider "paying rent" as mandatory or else you won't have a home. While it's entirely optional to choose not to pay rent; it causes a lot of other things that you probably don't want, like not having a place to store your possessions and having less life security.

It's important to talk about this overlap (in this case and in other similar cases where there are overlaps) or else your audience will fall into the categories of "that made sense straight away" and "that didn't make sense". while it may take more time to cover grey zones; it helps people who fall into the "unclear" category at first. (Particularly - people who this makes sense to; don't need to be reading it, people who are having difficulty making sense of the topic are the ones that need extra assistance to understand it.

Further:

For example, say we have to choose between watching an interesting television show that spans 7 seasons on Netflix, or we can read more of that Introductory Calculus textbook we just got.

this statement has an implied assumption that because "we just got" the calculus textbook, that it's a goal to read the book and understand that information. while that's a real "duh" moment for some people reading; the people who are saying, "I'd rather watch netflix" need to be explained that understanding calculus was a goal; therefore we purchased a textbook, therefore we want to read it. Along with this; deciding a goal and acting on it are important skills that are implied in what you wrote so far. I hope you can cover that more in the next pieces in the series.

Overall; a good start, I would encourage more polishing. Feel free to join the slack channel and share drafts for some feedback.

Concepts and ideas are often much clearer in our heads than what we actually say

Quite often we also think that concepts in our head are clear when they aren't. It's very easy to delude yourself.

You don't address any of the reasons why people might think that one shouldn't optimize to argue that those reasons are invalid. As a result I'm not sure that your essay will convince anybody.

Could you please truncate all those empty lines? Generally more than one line is enough to break a paragraph, and they're short enough as it is.