“What will your work look like in five years?” It’s one of those questions that shows up in job talks, mentoring meetings, and maybe even faculty reviews. Most people will put some rough targets out there; for job talks, there is likely a bit more concreteness to the targets since the vision needs to be a bit more convincing. Yet, many of us can struggle to create a real vision for the future. After all, five years is long enough for a field to shift, a collaborator to leave, a funding priority to change, or a completely different opportunity to show up that nobody could have planned for. Given all that uncertainty, it’s worth asking directly: what’s actually the point of writing one of these plans down?

The answer is that a five-year plan is never meant to predict the future accurately. Its value lies elsewhere, and understanding that changes how useful the exercise turns out to be.

A Compass, Not a Contract

A good five-year plan works less like a set of directions to a fixed destination and more like a compass: something that tells you which way is generally forward when you’re standing at a fork in the road, without pretending to know every twist between here and there. The goal isn’t to be right about what year four looks like. It’s to have a clear enough sense of direction that you can make a fast, confident decision when an unplanned opportunity or obstacle shows up, which it reliably will.

Without that compass, decisions tend to get made reactively: say yes to whatever request lands in the inbox this week, chase whichever funding call happens to be open, and take on a collaboration because declining feels awkward. None of those choices is wrong in isolation. The trouble is that a research program or career built entirely out of reactive yeses rarely adds up to something coherent, even when every individual choice made sense at the time. A vision gives you a standard to measure a new opportunity against: does this move me generally in the direction I care about, or does it just feel urgent right now?

Why Five Years, Specifically

Five years sits in a useful middle zone. It’s long enough to allow for a real shift—finishing a major project, building a new skill set, or changing research direction—that couldn’t realistically happen in one or two years. At the same time, it’s short enough to still feel concrete and personal, unlike a twenty-year plan, which tends to collapse into vague aspiration because so much between now and then is genuinely unknowable.

This middle-distance quality is exactly why the plan works best as a direction-setting tool rather than a task list. A one-year plan can reasonably include specific deliverables: submit this grant application, publish this paper, and hire this person. A five-year plan is better used to answer a different kind of question: what do I want to be true about my research program, my skills, or my position in the field five years from now, and what would I need to start doing today to make that plausible?

What Belongs in the Plan

A five-year plan that’s actually useful tends to include a few specific ingredients, beyond a simple list of hoped-for outcomes.

It helps to name two or three genuine priorities rather than an exhaustive wish list. A plan that tries to advance every possible goal at once—more funding, more publications, a bigger group, better work-life balance, a shift in research direction—functions less like a compass and more like noise, since it gives you no real basis for choosing between competing demands on a Tuesday afternoon. Naming the two or three that matter most gives the plan actual teeth.

It also helps to write down the decision criteria alongside the goals themselves, not just what you’re aiming for but what you’d say no to in service of it. If expanding into a new research area is a real priority, that’s worth pairing with a note about what you’re willing to deprioritize to make room for it. A plan that only lists additions and never subtractions tends to balloon into a source of overcommitment rather than a tool for focus.

Finally, it’s worth identifying the unknowns as well as what’s in your control. You won’t have everything figured out, but you can account for what’s in your control and what’s not. 

Remaining Flexible

Work the plan, and remain open to revising it as well. Both/and thinking is genuinely useful here: a plan can be a serious commitment worth defending against small distractions, and it can be wrong about the details.

In practice, this means distinguishing between two very different reasons a plan feels off track. Sometimes it’s off track because something easier and more comfortable pulled you away from it, in which case the plan should probably win. Sometimes it’s off track because the underlying goal or motivation genuinely changed… a new collaborator opened a door nobody could have anticipated, or a field-wide shift made the original direction less relevant… in which case revising the plan is more appropriate than forcing yourself back onto a path that no longer makes sense.

Sometimes the Plan Needs to Change Entirely

Every so often, the right response to a five-year plan isn’t a small adjustment but a genuine rethink. Faculty who find themselves outgrowing the questions that once drove their research aren’t failing to follow their old plan; they’re often responding to real intellectual growth that the old plan simply didn’t anticipate. If that sounds familiar, it’s worth knowing that expanding into new territory mid-career is a well-worn and legitimate path, not a sign that the earlier plan was a waste of time. The old plan did its job by getting you far enough to discover what the new one should say.

Revisit It, Don’t Just Write It

The single biggest failure mode for a five-year plan isn’t writing a bad one. It’s writing a reasonable one and then never looking at it again. A plan drafted once during a burst of January motivation and left untouched in a desktop folder will likely stop reflecting reality within a year, making it useless.

A better approach treats the plan as a living document with a fixed check-in; once or twice a year works well for most people, where the question isn’t “Did I do everything on this list?” but “Does this still describe where I actually want to go, and if not, what changed?” That regular reckoning is often more valuable than the original document, since it’s the moment where drift gets caught early instead of discovered three years later.

Back to the Original Question

So, what’s the point of a five-year plan if it’s likely to be wrong about the specifics? The point isn’t accuracy. It’s clarity: a documented sense of what actually matters to you, specific enough to guide a real decision under time or resource pressure, and flexible enough to adapt to the unknowns. The plan you write this year probably won’t describe your life in five years with much precision. What it can do is make sure the choices you make between now and then are pointed roughly in the same direction, rather than scattered across whatever happened to feel urgent on any given week.

The next time someone asks where you see yourself in five years, the useful answer probably isn’t a polished paragraph of predictions. It’s a shorter, truer one: here’s what I’m steering toward, and here’s how I’ll know if it’s time to adjust course.