Benjamin Todd

Here are some options.

Pick a time frame to review your plan, typically 6 to 24 months.

Go for shorter time frames when you're more uncertain and learning a lot, and longer ones when you're more settled.

Around the new year is often a nice time.

Review your plan when you next gain significant information about your career.

For example, publishing lots of papers in top journals is key to advancement in academic careers, so you could commit to reassessing whether you want to be an academic if you don't publish a certain number of papers by the end of your PhD.

When you do the review, the most important question to ask is, what have I learned since I last made a plan, and what might that imply about what longer-term paths and next steps are best?

Then go and discuss your thinking with someone else.

Other people are better able to spot the sunk cost fallacy, and having to justify your thinking to someone else has been shown to reduce your degree of bias.

If you have more time, it can be helpful to start from a blank slate.

If I were making a career plan today, which vision and next steps would seem best?

This can help you step out of your current situation and see things afresh.

Apply this to your own career.

Bringing all this advice together, here are the seven steps to building your own career plan.

1.

What's your career stage?

Exploring, building career capital, or deploying your existing career capital.

Two, what's your vision?

If you haven't already, sketch out your best guess shortlist of longer-term paths to aim towards and global problems to work on.

Your vision.