You Need To Change the Way You Plan

Our days, our weeks, our months, our years. We love to plan out every miniscule detail of our lives: where we want to attend university, what career we want in the future, how many children we hope to have, the age we want to be married by, how much weight we want to lose etc. We’re obsessed with constantly preparing for the future and figuring out the steps we need to take to achieve a goal or target.

Now, I’m all for achieving goals and I love having a structure to my day, so hence make to-do-lists in the morning to keep me on track and remind me of what I want to achieve. However, over the past year, I’ve realised how debilitating it can be to myself to constantly be planning, especially when things don’t quite pan out as I had originally intended. Moreover, I spend so much time preparing in advance and obsessing over reaching my next goals, that I never take the time to step back and take in what I have already achieved.

During my last year of sixth form, I spent the majority of my time making plans for my university application and as a result I never found the time to relax and actually enjoy the moment I was living in. In September of Year 13, I was planning out writing my personal statement, then once I’d completed that, I was preparing for admissions tests, then interviews, then finally my A-Level exams. Consequently, by December I had completely burned myself out because in those 4 months, I never once slowed down and took a step back from the situation to acknowledge how much I’d already completed. I was constantly looking to the future and never felt satisfied with how far I had progressed. My days became a series of countdowns to the next deadline and because I got used to not living in the present, I didn’t look after my mental or emotional health as I didn't realise how much it had deteriorated. 

At the start of 2019, as tends to happen in life, I had a curveball thrown at me, which completely threw me off track and caused me to reconsider everything I had been working towards thus far. I finally realised that my end goal which I had invested so much time and effort into until then wasn’t really something I wanted. I had been so fixated on achieving this goal that I never once stopped to consider if I actually wanted to achieve it, or if I just thought I was supposed to achieve it as I'd already come that far, so surely there was no point in giving up by that point?! 

This caused me to reconsider everything I’d worked for thus far and decide what my new goal was going to be. Although I now had to make a big decision about my new target, my meticulous planning for the future made it 10 times harder. For several months, I had obsessed and planned my life around achieving this one goal that I couldn’t see any other options. My life felt as though it had fallen apart, and I felt lost and confused about the future.

I realise now that if I had learned how to take a step back from the situation and not constantly been planning, I would have been able to consider other options. I also should have taken time to recognise how much I had achieved instead of turning into a robot and expecting myself to be operating at 100% 24/7!

Nowadays, we’re all so obsessed with planning out the future and we forget to live in the moment. When people are trying to lose weight, they usually do it with the aim of dropping a clothes size and until they achieve that, they feel dissatisfied with their progress. There also seems to be a general consensus of needing to find a partner/ have children/ own a house by a certain age, and if you haven’t achieved all of this before you’re 40 then something must have gone seriously wrong (!). As with all aspects of life, there really isn’t a one size fits all and I wish more people learned to go with the flow instead of stressing about things they cannot control.

I’m now learning that it’s better to have a rough plan for the future, but not to become fixated on a single goal in case I get redirected onto another pathway. There’s no way to determine what’s going to happen in the future, and I think that planning for the future makes people feel as though they’re a ‘failure’ if they have to change their goals due to unforeseeable circumstances. Even when we make back-up goals, we call them ‘Plan A’, ‘Plan B’, ‘Plan C’ etc, as if everything after ‘Plan A’ isn’t good or worthy enough. We need to change our mindsets and realise that just because we don’t always achieve ‘Plan A’, another plan isn’t worth anything less, it just means you’ve accounted for the unpredictability of life!

A quote that I’ve put on my vision board this year is “don’t count the days, make the days count”. I really love this quote because it’s a daily reminder to live in the moment and it prevents me spending my days counting down to my next big deadline or event. I still like to make a to-do-list on most days, but I’ve now reframed my mindset so that I don’t feel guilty if I don’t tick off all of my goals in a day. When I make my lists, like a lot of other people do, I always put on way more than I end up achieving in a day/ underestimate how long it will take to complete a task and that used to make me feel as though I hadn’t spent my day productively. However, now I know that it’s normal for people to overestimate how much they can achieve, I no longer feel guilty. Here’s a tip: according to leadership expert Greg McKeown, when you’re estimating how much time it will take to complete a task, multiply that number by three.

Over the past month, I’ve learned to slow down and appreciate the small things in life. In comparison to this time last year, I feel like a much calmer person with a better perspective of my priorities in life. I still love to plan, but nowadays, I make looser, more flexible plans and don’t beat myself up if things don’t pan out as I originally intended!

Could you make your plans more flexible and learn to live in the moment? 

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I hope you have a relaxing weekend and that you start making more flexible plans!