Fail to plan, plan to fail. I have lived by this line for years. Yesterday showed me what it costs when nobody applies it.

I came home after 48 hours away working. While I was gone, the kitchen sink drain had backed up. The waste disposal unit and the dishwasher were affected too, so the problem sat somewhere in the pipes under the sink. In a house with three children, the kitchen sink matters. We had a utility sink as a backup, but a backup is not a fix.

My wife gets more done in a day than almost anyone I know. She does not wait. She starts. Faced with a drain she did not understand, she did what she always does and got to work. She had cleared the outside drain and used plenty of plug unblocker. Nothing worked, so she took apart the pipework under the sink. She also lost a washer along the way and did not know this mattered.

When I got home I put the pipes back together. Water leaked from several joints. I had never assembled pipework before, and I did not know a washer is part of the seal. After a few YouTube videos, I understood. A trip to the hardware shop for a new washer fixed the leaks.

Then I turned to the original problem, the blocked drain. This part went more smoothly because I worked by elimination. The U-bend trap was clear. The outside drain was not overflowing. So the blockage sat in the three or four metres of pipe between the two. Drainage rods are too thick and rigid for pipes that twist and turn indoors. Another video showed me a drainage snake, which looks like old shower hosing. It bends round corners but stays firm enough to push through a blockage. A second trip to the shop, and last thing at night the drain ran clear.

An hour's job, at most, took me about half a day. Roughly six hours of that was one straight run of focus.

What I took from it

The planning gap cost us hours. Nobody in this story was careless or lazy. My wife acted with the energy she brings to everything, and she has never let procrastination slow her down. Ninety per cent of the time, this is the right way to work. I wish I had more of her speed.

Yesterday sat in the other ten per cent. When a job is complex and you know little about it, acting first makes things worse. Taking the pipework apart without a plan, without photos, without counting parts, created a second problem on top of the first. The original blockage was simple. The mess around it was the real cost.

I have my own side of this. I often use "fail to plan" as cover for procrastination. I tell myself I need more time to plan, and the result is no action at all. I do not want to hide behind a good quote. Planning is only useful if it leads to the work.

My ADHD gives me a strange balance here. I delay starting, but once I begin, I hyper focus and finish. That was true yesterday. Six hours straight, and the job was done. A short plan at the start would have saved most of those hours, and I would still have had the focus to finish.

How I now think about planning

Here is the rule I am taking from this:

- If I understand the job, I start. - If I do not understand the job, I stop and look at the whole picture first. - Before taking anything apart, I photograph it and count the parts. - I work out what I know and what I have ruled out, as I did with the trap and the outside drain. - I only then pick up a tool.

There is a well-known line about sharpening the axe before chopping the tree. The exact proportions people quote are loose, and I do not hold to a number. The point is clear enough. Time spent on the plan is rarely wasted, and in complex work it can be longer than the time spent on the action.

The same applies in business, where the variables multiply. A quick fix applied without understanding the system often creates a second problem on top of the first. I see this in my own work as often as anyone else's.

How this connects to the run

Today is day 2107 of my daily barefoot-style running streak. I have covered 16,209.68 km towards a lap of the world at 40,075 km, with 23,865.32 km still to go. A streak of this length is not built on intensity. It rests on a plan I rarely have to think about. The shoes are ready, the time is protected, and the run happens whether I feel like it or not. I am working towards a streak of around 16.5 years, so the system has to hold on bad days as well as good ones.

All of this exists to raise £1M for children's causes, including Great Ormond Street and BBC Children in Need. I record each run as a vlog because the more people this reaches, the more we can raise. I will not exaggerate what we have done so far. I will keep turning up, one day at a time.

Over to you

Where in your work or at home are you moving fast on something you do not yet understand? What would one hour of planning change? Tell me in the comments. If you believe in the mission, please watch the episode, subscribe and share it with someone who would value it.

Watch the full episode: https://youtu.be/XCk3weP3jeU