Quote of the week

“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1957, repeating a line he’d heard long before in the Army

He was talking about planning for emergencies: by definition they’re unexpected, so they never happen the way you planned. It’s the planning that gets you ready. In the planner, that’s the Sunday-night look at the week ahead.

Who he was

Dwight D. Eisenhower called himself “a poor country boy from Kansas”. In the Second World War he was Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, the man in charge of the D-Day invasion. From 1953 to 1961 he was the 34th President of the United States.

Where he said it

On 14 November 1957, in Washington, he spoke to the National Defense Executive Reserve Conference. Its members came at their own expense to plan how the country would keep running in an emergency.

The story he told

Before the First World War, he said, the Army’s staff college at Leavenworth taught its officers on maps of Alsace-Lorraine and the Champagne, in France. Reformers swapped them for maps of Leavenworth and Gettysburg, where the American Army “just might fight a battle”. About two years later, the Army was fighting in Alsace-Lorraine and the Champagne.

“The very definition of ‘emergency’ is that it is unexpected,” he said, “therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning.” So the first thing to do is “take all the plans off the top shelf and throw them out the window and start once more. But if you haven’t been planning you can’t start to work, intelligently at least.”

How it works in the planner

• The week you plan on Sunday night won’t be the week you get. The planning is what gets you ready for it.
• The Week Ahead shows the next seven days at a glance, so the clashes show up before Monday does.
• When a day goes sideways, nothing is lost. Anything you didn’t tick rolls on to today, every day, until you tick it.