Planning

Planning is the process of thinking regarding the activities required to achieve a desired goal. Planning is based on foresight, the fundamental capacity for mental time travel. The evolution of forethought, the capacity to think ahead, is considered to have been a prime mover in human evolution. Planning is a fundamental property of intelligent behavior. It involves the use of logic and imagination to visualise not only a desired end result, but the steps necessary to achieve that result. An important aspect of planning is its relationship to forecasting. Forecasting aims to predict what the future will look like, while planning imagines what the future could look like. Planning according to established principles is a core part of many professional occupations, particularly in fields such as management and business. Once a plan has been developed, it is possible to measure and assess progress, efficiency and effectiveness. As circumstances change, plans may need to be modified or even abandoned. Planning has been modelled in terms of intentions: deciding what tasks one might wish to do; tenacity: continuing towards a goal in the face of difficulty and flexibility, adapting one's approach in response implementation. An implementation intention is a specification of behaviour that an individual believes to be correlated with a goal will take place, such as at a particular time or in a particular place. Implementation intentions are distiguished from goal intentions, which specifies an outcome suc as running a marathon. Planning is one of the executive functions of the brain, encompassing the neurological processes involved in the formulation, evaluation and selection of a sequence of thoughts and actions to achieve a desired goal. Various studies utilizing a combination of neuropsychological, neuropharmacological and functional neuroimaging approaches have suggested there is a positive relationship between impaired planning ability and damage to the frontal lobe.