The Everyday Life of Planning – The Planning of Everyday Life

Abstract The present contribution is concerned with the question of how interactants in everyday situations bring about future plans and how they speak about shared projects of action. Making plans and speaking about tomorrow are firmly established elements of the everyday life-world. For everyday actors, speaking about the future is the central way of anticipating and shaping it. In speaking about the future, we address a part of the life-world which as yet is not within our reach, but soon will be. From this, the future emerges as a joint endeavor. The contribution explores the essential structural features of everyday conversation about the future: Via conversation about the future, actors reduce uncertainty and unpredictability. Plans, however, have the core property of being unstable . They are gradually transferred by actors from instability to stability. Plans, by necessity, are kept tentative . They are open-ended. With remarkable frequency, plans are brought up en passant in everyday situations. In this way, actors continually keep the goal of their plans at the horizon of their present, thus affirming its relevance. The contribution is based on empirical data (audio and video recordings) which are analyzed with methods of conversation analysis. However, the argument is primarily concerned with a demonstration of what structural features, stemming from the constitution and the structures of the everyday life-world, are inherent in conversation about the future.