One of the things I remember my father saying a lot was, “Those who fail to plan, plan to fail.” It was annoying to hear, especially as a teenager who I now realize had a half-baked prefrontal cortex and almost no ability to delay gratification. 

I think we have a different challenge today that is the primary thing that gets in the way of real prioritization or planning, I’ll call it the cult of “busy-ness.” The technology we have adopted over the last decade has enabled us to be “reachable” via a huge number of channels, in all locations, at all times. This has created an “interrupt driven” workday and what looks like simply keeping up with the inputs as being defined as “real work.” The issue with this is that the inputs are not coming into you in any sort of prioritized order. If your day is simply managed by what inputs reach you, there is a good chance you’re ignoring what’s most important to your business. The cult of busy-ness makes it difficult to justify taking time in order to prioritize what your next action should be. Think about how silly that sounds. Your time is your most precious resource; planning and prioritizing how you’re going to spend it should not be so difficult.

I think the reason we don’t want to plan/prioritize is that it forces us to make the difficult decisions that we keep deferring. If your company is still running on a Print MIS solution whose support stopped two years ago, wouldn't you rather focus on getting a customer job out the door than deal with that elephant in the room? If you keep yourself busy you can justify your procrastination on the difficult decisions. Going to work in a custom manufacturing company provides a perfect opportunity for distraction and the cult of busy-ness.