Stop Planning. Start Moving.

Vision without execution is hallucination.
~ Thomas Edison

I've been thinking about this quote a lot lately. Mostly because the teams I've lead in the past have been guilty of exactly that. We plan. We strategize. We hold meetings about the plan we made in the last meeting. And then, somehow, we end up right where we started.

Sound familiar?

Here's the thing. Success doesn't come from better planning frameworks. Trust me, I've tried most of them. It comes from doing fewer things, better. And actually finishing them.

So I changed my approach to planning. And it started with getting honest about why the teams I managed kept getting stuck.

The Five Traps

There were distinct patterns that kept tripping us up. Once I saw them, I couldn't unsee them.

The "everything is urgent" trap. When everything is a priority, nothing is. The Pareto Principle is simple, 20% of your effort drives 80% of your results. The rest is noise. Strategic focus isn't about doing more. It's about having the discipline to do less.

Multitasking doesn't work. Everyone thinks they are good at multitasking. We're not. Research is pretty clear on this, doing multiple things at once just means you're doing several things poorly. Real progress comes from concentrated effort on one thing at a time.

The false promise of optimization. We live in a world that is obsessed with achieving superhuman levels of productivity. Better systems, better tools, better routines. You don't need a better productivity system. You need fewer things on the list, and the courage to ignore the rest.

Our willpower is under attack. Willpower is like a battery. It gets chipped away at throughout the day from a constant barrage of notifications, emails, meetings, and doom-scrolling social media. By the end of the day we are running on fumes. We need to be intentional about our energy management and limiting distractions.

The cost-benefit blind spot. We overestimate how hard something will be and underestimate what we'll get from doing it. So we procrastinate. We delay. We convince ourself the timing isn't right. Huge payoffs usually become obvious in hindsight.

Milestone Planning

This is not an original idea. It's not complicated, and that's why it works.

Instead of mapping out an entire year in painful detail, you focus on one milestone at a time. You finish it. You learn from it. Then you move to the next one.

There are only five steps.

1. Start with the vision. Where are you actually going? Not the corporate mission statement version. The destination that excites you enough to do hard things.
2. Map it backwards. From that vision, work your way back. Ask yourself: What has to be true for this to happen? Then break that into milestones; the sequential steps that build on each other. Work all the way back until today.
3. Commit to the current milestone. Just one. Don't even think of the next milestone until the current one is completed. This is where my teams have usually fallen apart. They want to work on everything simultaneously. Don't.
4. Measure it. If you can't track it, you can't manage it. Define clear, specific metrics for each milestone. These can't be vanity metrics. Real ones that tell you whether you're making progress or just staying busy.
5. Pause and reassess. After each milestone, stop. What did you learn? What changed? What do you know now that you didn't before? Then adjust and keep moving forward.

The Three Questions

For each milestone, ask these questions:

1. What has to be true to hit this milestone in this timeframe? This strips away the wishful thinking and forces clarity.
2. What are we actually measuring? Not what sounds good. What's the real signal that tells us we have achieved the milestone.
3. What's the one thing that would make everything else easier, or unnecessary? If you can do only one thing, what moves the needle the most? Do that.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Say your vision is to become a three-star Michelin restaurant.
What has to be true?
You need a strong reputation.
Before that, full seats and great reviews.
Before that, a menu worth talking about.
Before that, a kitchen and front of house that can execute.
And before any of that, the right space and concept.

The Takeaway

Milestone planning isn't just a framework. It's a mindset.

Stop trying to do everything at once. Pick the next logical milestone. Define what success looks like. Do the work, learn, and move on.

Success isn't just about working harder. It's about working hard with intention, and having the patience to let each step build on the last.

Onward we go.