What is recovery planning?

Recovery planning is a concept in personal epistemology: For every important process have a documented way to recover from common failures.

Example: You run a weekly content workflow: research on Monday, draft on Tuesday, edit on Wednesday, publish on Thursday. One Tuesday you open your laptop and the draft document is gone — cloud sync corrupted the file overnight. You have no backup, no previous version saved, no alternative workflow. You spend four hours reconstructing the draft from memory and miss your Wednesday edit window. The entire week's pipeline collapses. Compare this to a writer who keeps a local backup of every draft, has a template that captures key research notes separately from the draft itself, and has a documented fallback: 'If the draft is lost, reconstruct from the research notes file and the outline in my planning doc within 90 minutes.' Same failure. One person has a recovery procedure. The other discovers the need for one at the worst possible moment.

This concept is part of Phase 25 (Error Correction) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for error correction.