I didn’t want to downplay planning. I used to work in public health, I wrote policy papers and gave lectures all the time and I used outlining to construct those. When I retired and started writing novels and short stories I needed to break or at least change some of those habits. I remember starting a chapter in a novel with six bullet points and then it hitting me like a brick in the face that novels don’t look like that.
I find I fall back on outlining and similar planning techniques when the plot is complex; like having several streams of action that eventually come together, or where the timeline gets complicated. Usually by the time I am half way into a book I will have a set of scrappy notes that could pass as a plan on a foggy day and probably a timeline of the main events and scenes. Sometimes I even look at them when I’m writing.