On Planning:

"A decision is a choice of action - of what to do or not to do."

"Planning is decision making, except that it does not result in immediate action."

"Many of our decisions require us to choose between satisfying our goals for the immediate present and our goals for our futures ..." "We can think of [such conflicts as analogous to social dilemmas:] Instead of a conflict between self and other, the conflict is between a >present self< and a >future self<. A basic problem we have in such conflicts is that we are biased in favor of our present self. Our future self, like >others< in social dilemmas, is distant and has less claim on our attention. We begin to be aware of this problem in childhood, and we develop methods of self-control."

"We can think of decisions about the future as plans or policies. A plan is a decision to do something at a future time. When we cook a meal, we usually have some plan in mind. We do certain things at one time and put off other things for the future. The crucial step here is that we decide now to do something at a later time. There would be no point in planning if we were unable to hold ourselves to this decision. The study of planning, therefore, is intimately tied up with the study of self-control. A policy is a plan that binds us to perform a certain action regularly or under certain conditions. We might establish a policy of practicing the violin for half an hour every day, for example, or a policy of never picking up hitchhikers. A plan is not a policy when it involves only a single, isolated decision, such as planning to go to the movies on a certain day. A policy applies to a whole class of behavior that recur regularly in our lives."

Thinking and deciding

Jonathan Baron (1988)