About as much planning as goes into maintaining a Ravelry account's projects/queue/favourites page and comparing my LYS's online stock to whatever yarn is called for to work out how many options I have that might suit a given project. I rarely get started straight away though, I have about 9 things in my queue right now that I have the yarn ready and waiting for plus two WIP projects and I prefer knowing I'm not likely to run out of planned projects anytime soon so I'll continue adding to that as I finish things.

Haven't been checking in regularly but I've been plugging away at my Christmas scarf which I started when badly_knitted was doing the posts. I had to stop and frog about a quarter or so of a scarf though when it became obvious (once I got a bit further into a non-colourwork bit and could compare widths) that my tension/gauge was terrible for the starting colourwork. I've had a much better second go of it though, went up another needle size and paid more attention to not pulling my strands too tight and it's muuuuch better so I'm feeling pleased about that.