TED Talk “The gap between planning and doing”
- ironically, the first step towards closing the gap between planning and doing is to become aware that we cannot escape from it and to understand the gap
- it helps to think of ourselves in the future as different persons than we are today
- the present self is planning, and the future self is doing and the gap between planning and doing essentially is the result of a disagreement between our current and our future selves
- in general, we care less about the future than about the present so the further in the future self the less priority it gets, that's what causes the gap between planning and doing
- we have to project ourselves to the future, we have to imagine how much our future selves will like what our current self decides today, we tend to overestimate how similar our future selves are to our current selves (projection bias)
- the gap between planning and doing shows that we failed to do the right things or maybe we just failed to make the right plants, so it's not clear which self is to blame
- make plans more realistic, if we adopt this strategy of realistic planning then we are essentially shifting some decision power from our current to our future selves because our current self has to adjust to whatever our future self will do