OPD: Obsessive Planning Disorder

OPD is what I call Obsessive Planning Disorder. As you’ve already guessed, it’s what happens when you over plan things a bit too much. Even though it sounds a bit like a proper medical condition, it’s not — I’m being deliberately light-hearted with the name. But it’s still a worrying trait that some people have that causes them excessive stress and a lack of progress in their lives.

One quick note before we go further. Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder is a real and separate clinical condition, and part of what defines it is a genuine preoccupation with lists, order and plans that gets in the way of actually finishing things — which is close enough to what I’m describing here that it’s worth being clear about the difference. OPD, as I’m using it, is just a light, informal way of describing an everyday habit, not a diagnosis. If planning or checking rituals in your own life ever feel genuinely uncontrollable, or the distress they cause feels out of proportion to the situation, that’s worth raising with your own GP rather than something to try to plan your way out of.

The more you plan, the more you tend to worry, and the more stress this causes you. Planning and worry are linked but they’re totally different entities. Planning is about finding solutions whilst worry is stress caused by thinking about the things that could go wrong. Planning and worry are on different ends of the same scale, and there’s a point on this scale when over planning lapses into worry. You cross that line without noticing, and suddenly you’re not planning anymore. You’re just worrying with extra steps.

As well as causing worry, over planning can cause you to concentrate too much on the trivial things. You get so caught up in the planning itself that you lose yourself in it and never get to actually do what you’re planning to do. I see this constantly. People who’ve spent six months planning to start something new, researching every possible detail, creating spreadsheets and contingency plans and backup contingency plans, but the trouble is they often never start.

Over planning can also make you too rigid in your thinking. You try to stick to your plans when really you should be a bit more adaptive when circumstances change. Even worse, you can lose spontaneity and fail to take opportunities because your main agenda is staying to plan, even when that plan is not the best course of action anymore. The plan becomes more important than the outcome. The map becomes more important than the journey.

Planning takes mental energy but in return you get back clarity and direction. Over planning however takes too much mental energy for what you get back. The worry and stress over planning causes can wear you out even before you set about your task. The message is simple. There’s no point trying to control things you can’t control. It’s awful to say it, but for some people the amount of stress over planning causes, they’d probably have been better just jumping in at the deep end and not having a plan at all. At least they would have made a start.

Often you can’t actually see every step towards your end goal. For some, this is difficult to handle and for these people they’re in danger of never taking the first step. Often in life the direction is clear. You know where the end point is. There are a few steps that won’t become clear until you’re nearer that part of the journey. You can’t see them from here, and that’s okay. That’s normal. That’s how it works.

Sometimes planning is a bit like driving in the dark. Even with the headlights, only the next fifty to one hundred metres is lit up. Just enough for you to see what you need to see, just enough to safely navigate to the next bend in the road. Yet with each turn you’re getting closer to your destination.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a day when I could say that everything has gone to plan — there are too many variables in the real world. Spending time and too much mental energy on things that will sort themselves out or are just trivial leaves you unprotected to the demands of daily life. You’re so busy planning for imaginary problems that you can’t handle the real ones when they arrive.

Over planning leads to you trying to plan life rather than embrace it. Getting irritated by the day to day is not a good place to be. Over planning takes you away from the moment, away from the now, away from where you can make the most difference, and away from a place of optimum performance. You’re so focused on what should happen according to your plan that you can’t respond to what is happening in reality.

As people say, change is inevitable. I like to think that changes of plans can be inevitable too. Feeling low when something doesn’t go to plan puts your internal emotions in the hands of external circumstance rather than in your control. You’re letting reality dictate your emotional state, which means you’re always going to be disappointed because reality never cooperates perfectly with your plans.

The Real Problem with OPD

Here’s what you need to understand about OPD. It’s not about planning being bad. Planning is good. Planning is necessary. The problem is when planning becomes a way to avoid doing. When you’re planning your third contingency for a scenario that’s very unlikely to happen while you haven’t even started on the main task. When you’re researching and preparing and optimising and never actually executing.

I see this in my practice all the time. Someone wants to lose weight, so they spend weeks researching the perfect diet plan, the optimal workout routine, the best supplements, the ideal meal timing. They’ve got spreadsheets. They’ve got schedules. They’ve got backup plans for their backup plans. They know everything about how they’re going to lose weight except what it actually feels like to be hungry and push through it, because they never start.

The planning feels productive. It feels like you’re doing something. You’re being responsible, you’re being smart, you’re thinking ahead. But you’re not making progress. You’re making plans. There’s a massive difference. Progress is measured by what changes in reality, not by how detailed your plans are.

OPD is particularly common in people who are afraid of failure. If you never start, you never fail. If you’re always planning, you can tell yourself you’re not ready yet, you need to think it through more, you need to account for more variables. It’s a perfect excuse. It sounds reasonable. It sounds responsible. But it’s still just fear dressed up as prudence.

The antidote to OPD is accepting that you can’t plan for everything, that perfection isn’t possible, that you’re going to have to figure some things out as you go. The antidote is starting before you’re ready, before you’ve got everything figured out, before you’ve planned for every contingency. The antidote is doing something imperfectly rather than planning something perfectly.

Plans are great, but over planning isn’t. Suffering from OPD can cause some people never to take the first step. They can lose spontaneity, lose flexibility and miss opportunity. Nothing ever goes 100% to plan but by resetting your expectations a little, you can save yourself so much stress and worry and you can start embracing life a bit more along the way.

How to Know You’ve Got OPD

Here’s a rule of thumb. If you’ve been planning something for longer than it would take to actually do it, you’ve got OPD. If you’ve spent more time thinking about starting than you would need to spend actually starting, you’ve got OPD. If you can describe your plan in more detail than you can describe any actual progress you’ve made, you’ve got OPD.

Try this. Look at your last three big goals. How much time did you spend planning before you took any action? If the ratio of planning to doing is greater than 1 to 1, that’s your answer right there. Research by Webb and Sheeran (2006) found that even a solid change in how much you intend to do something only translates into a small change in what you actually do — intention and action are far more loosely connected than most people assume. Planners who never execute are, in the end, indistinguishable from people who never intended to try.

There’s also the diagnostic question of how you feel when you’re planning. If it feels comfortable, safe, even enjoyable, that’s a warning sign. Action should feel slightly uncomfortable because it involves real risk. Planning feels comfortable because it involves no risk. If you’re getting a buzz from your spreadsheets and your colour-coded timelines, you might want to ask yourself what you’re getting out of this that isn’t actual progress.

The Cure Is Simple, But Not Easy

The cure is simple but not easy. Start. Start now. Start before you’re ready. Start with an imperfect plan. Start with 70% of the information you think you need. Start with the knowledge that you’ll figure the rest out as you go. Because you will. Everyone does. That’s how it actually works in the real world, despite what your perfectly planned fantasy says.

You don’t need a perfect plan. You need a good enough plan and the willingness to adjust as you go. You don’t need to see the whole journey. You need to see the next step. You don’t need to plan for every contingency. You need to plan for the likely scenarios and accept that you’ll handle the unlikely ones if they happen.

Stop planning. Start doing. The plan will never be perfect. The timing will never be ideal. You’ll never have all the information you want. Accept that and start anyway, or accept that you’re choosing to never start at all. Those are your only two options, and OPD is just a way of pretending you’ve chosen the first when you’ve actually chosen the second.

Further reading

• Gollwitzer, P. M. & Sheeran, P. (2006) — ‘Implementation intentions and goal achievement’
• Webb, T. L. & Sheeran, P. (2006) — ‘Does changing behavioral intentions engender behavior change?’
• Oettingen, G. — Rethinking Positive Thinking
• Schwartz, B. — The Paradox of Choice
• Simon, H. A. (1956) — ‘Rational choice and the structure of the environment’