The morning is ground zero for planning. What will your second grader bring for sharing? When will you pick up the dry cleaning? Do you have time to work out today, and if so, should you pack your good running shoes or your second-string gym shoes? When will the dogs get a walk so they don’t go marauding for stuffed things to tear apart and spread around the backyard while you’re at work? Who will pick up the kids, or should they take sleeping bags and toothbrushes to school so that you can pick them up tomorrow? The list is endless, and it’s a miracle of the brain that some of the plans you make in the morning may even come to pass as you design them.
The skill of successful planning depends on something called executive function, which lives in a little chunk of your frontal lobe. In the morning, you use your executive function to look into the future—you imagine the future you desire, generate options for behaviors that could create this future, and finally decide on the best option to get from where you are now to that idyllic future you imagine (in which everyone is happy, fed, cleaned, educated, exercised, enriched, and in bed by 8:30 p.m.).
Without executive function, you can’t look into the future, you can’t plan, and so you become impulsive, acting in ways that pay off right now but may be bad in the long term. In short, without executive function, you become a teenager: impulsive and incapable of making decisions that will seem good in hindsight. Teenagers have an excuse, since the prefrontal cortex, which holds executive function and its skill of planning ahead, isn’t fully developed until your mid-twenties. Technically, the teenage brain is still “pruning” pathways to make executive function more efficient. And this means that for better or for worse, as you set out on the great journey that is your teenage years, all the possibilities of executive function still stretch out before you. It still seems like maybe it’s a good idea to ride a skateboard off the roof while a cute girl is watching. Or maybe it’s fine to ditch your friend to dance with that really hot guy at a concert. The teenage brain hasn’t yet pruned away these possibilities. It hasn’t hardwired the ability to look into the future to predict consequences, and so it can’t plan—it can’t visualize the future it wants, generate strategies to get there, and pick the one that’s most likely to lead from A to B. First it needs to get rid of all those synapses that lead down side roads and around roundabouts, those pesky inefficient synapses that make teenagers the stars of the vast majority of “fail” videos on YouTube.
This morning as you’re planning the mechanics of your day, your only excuse for failure is forgetting to use your prefrontal cortex. The key to successful planning is to put your future self in charge—to imagine in the morning that you’re looking back at the day with hindsight. What will you wish that you’d done? For example, studies of grocery buying show that intentionally imagining that your future self in charge makes people buy healthier food. The other lesson from studies of planning is that the only way to truly improve is with practice: only planning really makes you better at planning. Start by being conscious of what works and what does not. Can you really combine picking up the dry cleaning with buying dog food on the trip home? Can you really walk the dogs enough in that middle-of-the-day break to keep them from eating the house? Like a teenager’s brain, the more you prune away the inefficient neural pathways that leave your kids stranded at soccer practice and your dogs unwalked, the less fail you will find in your ability to successfully plan the day.
Train Your Body, Train Your Brain
A 2011 study published in the journal Science collects all the strategies proven to boost executive function. It includes things you might expect, like computer-based brain training. But it also includes things like aerobic exercise and mindfulness training. It seems that an efficient body translates to an efficient mind, at least when it comes to the executive-function skill of planning.