Daily Dose 46: Back Planning

If you have ever used a wedding planner, or read an article on Six Week Countdown to the Holiday, you’ve seen back planning in action. Getting dinner ready on time and getting out of the house on time in the morning are routine back planning “projects” in the home. Any Liberty Bell deadline is a subset or first cousin of back planning. 

Scheduling preparation times and intermediate deadlines for school projects and tests, home improvement projects, business projects, vacations, special speaking engagements, and developing new routines into your life, are some other events where back planning is useful.

What is back planning?

Back planning is the not-so-simple habit of starting at a deadline and planning backwards, setting intermediate deadlines or action steps needed to reach a starting date that will let you meet the final deadline successfully. Its twin, pre-planning, attacks a project from the front end.

The big advantage to back planning

Either direction should work equally well, but back planning always seems to work better for one simple reason. Back planning makes the ultimate starting time more objective, more official, and less optional. The date is always sooner than we think it should be, but realizing the whole project may be sabotaged if we don’t start “on time,”  we make a greater effort to begin on schedule.

With pre-planning, our current time obligations are foremost in our minds, and too often we accommodate by planning to start in what we think will be a more “convenient” season, but which often turns out to be too late to finish comfortably.

Back planning Requirements

Back planning requires a lot from us:

• We need a final deadline
• We must KNOW all the in-between steps that need doing to reach a successful conclusion (most people don’t and learning how to break down such projects is the secret sauce for success)
• We need to know EVERYTHING INVOLVED to achieve each intermediate step to determine how much time to give those intervening steps
• We need to know EVERYTHING about the schedule that might impact our plan: other projects’ work time, trips, sub-contractor schedules, when help is available, times places are open,  etc.
• We need to actually record the intermediate steps and deadlines on the calendar
• We need to hold ourselves the individual steps and deadlines we’ve set

You see, if you can do all that, you are virtually assured of a successful conclusion! This why business leaders ask for an action plan (all of the above) when they are not overly enthused with someone’s brainstorm. They know it will take a long time to figure out and align all those details, giving them a long time to continue ignoring the request. Who knows, maybe more diligent back planning in the home, might make our children better in business.

A Humble Starting Activity for Back Planning Practice

Potential business success, good study habits, great holiday or wedding planning: many future benefits are powerful incentives for apprentices to gain back planning expertise by regularly preparing family meals–all in addition to the benefits of eating, of course!