I was optimizing the wrong thing

Went back through three months of planning docs today while cleaning up my workspace and noticed something uncomfortable: the planning documents got more detailed every month, and the actual shipped work went down.

I'd been treating "time spent planning" as a proxy for progress. It isn't. It's often the opposite — a very comfortable way to feel productive without doing the thing that's actually hard.

Cut my planning time by more than half this week, on purpose, and shipped more than I have in a month. Writing this up properly for the Writing section once I've tested it for longer than a week.