What if your planning process is killing your motivation?
Theresa Amabile and her team sifted through 12,000 work diaries looking for one thing: what makes work feel meaningful and energizing? What makes people do their best work?
The answer was simple and powerful: visible progress toward something meaningful.
Not big wins. Not praise. Not perks.
Progress.
A client said to me the other day,
“I don’t see the point of this planning habit. I write things down and don’t accomplish most of them. It’s demotivating.”
I immediately thought about 2 things:
First, I clearly hadn’t explained what kind of planning we were doing: we were planning inputs, not outcomes. Actions we control, not results influenced by dozens of factors.
Second, the purpose of the planning wasn’t to create pressure but to increase motivation so you take more reps, so results become more likely and so you learn faster from doing.
It got me thinking again,
We confuse planning with predicting.
We plan for outcomes we can’t control, and then we judge ourselves on whether reality obeyed our script.
The goal of planning isn’t to guarantee the result. (Which you can't)
It’s to guarantee the reps, the only part you actually control.
If you’re losing motivation, working on things, it’s often because you’re tracking the wrong things. You’re measuring the harvest, not the planting. You’re trying to control outcomes instead of actions.
And when you’re trying to create results you’ve never created before?
It will take longer, be messier, and look nothing like the version in your head. Optimism bias will fool you into thinking it should have happened already. It won’t.
That’s why the role of planning is simple:
Make invisible progress visible.
Capture the learnings.
Show the foundation forming under your feet.
Reward the reps.
Don’t write “get a client” or “finish a launch” on a to-do list.
Write the actions you can execute with near certainty.
Then, if those don’t happen, it's a good place to explore your systems, not your worth.
So over to you dear reader, is your planner filled with things to do, or things to get?
And which one do you think is killing your motivation?
