Recently I was poking around in my previous posts and discovered a bit of a shocker. Although I talk about a lot of life order stuff, and I’ve had one somewhat forgettable post about planners, it seems I’ve never written about planning. Planning-adjacent, perhaps, but not the actual thing itself.
How could this be?
Perhaps because, as the fish has no idea it’s wet, I don’t really know what it’s like not to plan, not have planned, or not be in a plan. It’s on my mind now because this week, I have a plan to devote the majority of my time this week to strategic planning.
But also, planning can be overrated—overhyped. I’m even questioning right now if it’s worth it to have a whole post devoted to it, but absent something better (and given that it’s been weeks since I’ve posted), here goes.
What I’m getting to here is that we can work on a plan until the recalcitrant cows come home, but it will never play out exactly as we thought it would. I mean this point in the most literal sense.
Any parent who’s thrown a birthday party knows exactly what I’m talking about. You can choose a date, location, activities, guest list, send out invites, order the cake, and book your Young Sir’s favorite ventriloquist – but something you carefully listed out or counted on will change or shift. In my case, it was usually my Young Sir waking up with a fever on the day of. Good times.
“It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near one.” – J.R.R. Tolkien
You know how in cartoons or movies the villain will clasp their hands and say something like, “Ah-ah-ah, it’s all going according to my evil plan!”? And, of course, it doesn’t. They inevitably get caught (or escape) without much of anything they were counting on trending in their direction. Batman, or a runaway with a bucket of water, or those meddlin’ kids always manage to barge in and screw everything up.
In a bigger picture, real-life sense, how many times do we say something along the lines of, “It was never in my plan to _____ [get married at 50, go to grad school, switch careers, have kids, start a business, become a monk, whatever].” Once upon a time, I planned to be a clarinetist in a major orchestra (ideally, the Metropolitan Opera). If someone had walked up to me when I was 19 and told me I’d be doing what I am now – holy cow.
So many of us (especially those who try to control our fates with excessive strategizing) work all the angles, consider all the factors, get everything lined up down to the finest detail, and beat ourselves up when something throws it off. Like the beautiful, perfect morning routine wrecked by waking up to a kitchen flooded by the dishwasher. The dishwasher cares naught for your routine, silly human. We can’t hold ourselves responsible for every variable – and some of us really chafe against that truth. Thus, planning becomes stressful and disappointing.
On the other side of this spectrum is the person who bumps along, reacting to whatever appears before them in their life journey. Eternally oblivious (perhaps happily so), and continually taken off guard, the bandwidth or know-how it might take to create a plan seems out of reach – or even, ironically, a sign of incompetence. As if thinking through and writing stuff down must mean they have some sort of weakness. They “should” know how it’s all supposed to go, automatically. A plan seems like something other people do, maybe even a waste of time.
And then…there’s the curious situation where people become so taken with the planning of a thing, they burn out before they ever take the first action step. That’s likely another post.
There are many quotes about how failing to plan is planning to fail, most of which I am purposely avoiding. Most leave out a major consideration: the importance of flexibility, acceptance, and the hard truth (although Robert Burns’ “To a Mouse” is worth a revisit). Of course, a plan maps you in the direction of a goal, but something, even if very small, is not going to run as expected. Is it still worth it? Absolutely.
Say you want to set up your next travel adventure. While there is something to be said for throwing a toothbrush in a backpack and just heading out on the open road, if you’re looking to experience another country or plan around a major attraction, you need a little something to go by – touchpoints to keep you in the vicinity of what you want. When I visited Kenya last summer – oh the planning! Absent our group’s extensive (and well-conceived) itinerary, I’m estimating that 85-90% of what I experienced wouldn’t have happened. The other 10-15%? Nothing that was within our control – and that had to be ok. A sudden thunderstorm meant our Gilligan’s Island-esque 3-hour boat tour was cut short (complete with us belting out the theme song, much to the disgust of the captain). Acceptance was never in question, and we made the best of it.
The calm before…
Consider the resilience of skyscrapers in Japan, specially constructed to handle earthquakes. The structure of the building is required to even have the building at all, but flexibility is engineered in, from the foundation through the many floors. From this BBC article:
“Japan is home to some of the most resilient buildings in the world – and their secret lies in their capacity to dance as the ground moves beneath them.”
Dance, as the ground moves beneath…
Wow. It’s kind of cool to think about plans as dances, isn’t it?
So I’m wondering – what kinds of plans have you made that went awry? How did you shift, or move with the unexpected?
p.s. Even my plans to write this post went a little sideways. I opened my Grammarly editor only to discover it’s no longer available on my desktop 😩 (and for some reason, the password not saved in my Lastpass 😩 😩). It also tried to correct Tolkien 🙄.
I am also a planner, but I often make the mistake of not breaking my plan down into small enough steps. As a result, I will look at the next step, decide it will take more time than I have right now, and postpone it several times before I realize my mistake.
The smaller the steps are, the less likely it is that I’ll get derailed when something happens that’s outside my control, because I won’t get stuck in the middle of something. If I can’t proceed to the next step for some reason, perhaps it can be shifted down in the order so I can work on something else and still be moving forward.
Thanks, Janet – this points to something I talk about frequently with clients: the distinction between a task and a project. Breaking things down can make something more approachable. And then, yes, there’s that whole thing about getting hung up waiting on some other outside factor (usually another person!).
Big planner over here. On the one hand, it is a strength. I think about to bring things we might need on a trip, or check Maps to avoid traffic. On the other hand, I know it is harder for me to pivot when the plans fall through. I have a lot of respect for those who roll with the punches. I think it is easier to “roll” if you only have to take care of yourself. If you are a caregiver, the punches can make a trip painful.
The idea of a plan as a dance is awesome!
Yes, we can get really attached to outcomes. And that’s an excellent point about the self-care. I’m including a “plan” for that as well this week! Thanks for commenting, Seana.
Thank you. I’m not overly detailed when I plan. I like to think of a plan as scaffolding: Just like scaffolding adjusts during construction, a good plan can be changed as you get new information.
Details are in the eyes of the planner, aren’t they? Some of us like to really zoom in, others keep it more of a loose set of guidelines. Thanks for stopping by, Cathy.
I have always been a planner. But on my vision board I have a large picture with the saying, “Plan to go off the plan!” One simply cannot let a plan deviation ruin the whole vision. My 19-year-old self would certainly swoon at the person I have become but I am quite happy with myself now. We evolve and so do our plans.
Thanks Jonda – I’m a fan of thinking of it all as a process of evolving.
That is the thing about planning that my oerfectionist brain needs to understand “it will never play out exactly as we thought it would!” But a good think to accept and not feel bad about. 🙂
It’s tough to accept a deviation from the “perfect,” isn’t it? But it’s also true sometimes that what ends up happening is even better than what we envisioned (or works out in a way that avoids something unpleasant). All part of the dance, right? Thanks for the comment, Pam.
General (and eventual President) Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable”. On another occasion, he said, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” It’s not just a military thing. How often do our plans go off the rails — as you said, Young Sir has a fever on birthday party day, or as happened to me a little over a week ago, I awoke to my doorbell ringing and a neighbor telling me someone had smashed my car window (and those of other neighbors). Sigh. That wasn’t in the plan!
As an inveterate planner, I always have the short-term plan in my head: the next hour, tomorrow, the rest of the week, next month. I am in my happy place when I’m planning out what and how and when things will happen in the near term, and as frustrated (and it’s a lot) as I get when things go awry, having a plan, even if it’s not the plan that gets put into effect, helps me rebalance everything. Nobody would ever say I’m flexible, but planning allows me to bend rather than break. It’s the planning, not the plan, that works the magic.
Note I said I’m good at near-term planning. I can plan the next hour or week or month, but as detailed as my plans were up through college, that’s where my life plans ended. I went to grad school because I didn’t yet have a working career plan; I had my first career because I couldn’t figure out a plan to get where I thought I wanted to be. And I certainly never planned to have the career I’ve had now almost twice as long as my first. I’m not sure how Eisenhower would feel about that, but I envy you your skills at longer term strategic planning, Sara! Thanks for putting the focus where it needs to be!
Ah, yes, Eisenhower – he of so many productive ideas we use today. It sounds to me like you’ve experienced a nice mix of planning and allowing life to show you some new adventures. You definitely have some great stories to tell as a result! And I’m not so sure I’m skillful at the long-term – I guess this week will reveal that!
As an inveterate, almost compulsive planner who has been known to wake up in the middle of the night and try to get back to sleep by planning something out in my head, I struggle with letting go and NOT planning! The serious anxiety I cause myself when things are not planned out to the perfect “T” is something I’ve battled for years and years! When the anxiety monster rears its ugly head, I have gotten into the practice of reminding myself about all the times there was last-minute, sketchy planning, or indeed, no planning at all, and everything worked out ok anyway! I’ve gotten better as I’ve aged – with the realization that control is all an illusion anyway…It’s a skill I’ve yet to master, but still working on it!
Yes, control is an illusion. But we still yearn for it, don’t we? Thanks for your thoughts here, Lisa.
The quote about how Japanese skyscrapers are built says it all! Flexibility is the key to any plan. Because as you said, no matter how many i’s you dot or t’s you cross, something will NOT go according to the plan. It doesn’t mean don’t plan. Instead, building flexibility into the plan helps you normalize and figure out the following steps when something goes sideways.
Recently, I was getting into a stress/worry loop about the plans and commitments I made. It seemed like a lot because it was. But then I talked it through out loud. I acknowledged two things- 1) I always make my deadlines, and 2) When stuff doesn’t go according to plan, I’m a resilient, creative thinker. I’ll figure it out.
Flexibility has to be part of the plan.
Thanks Sara! Always love reading your posts.
Thanks, Pemberton – it’s so good to know people out there are reading!