Is All Your Planning Really Self-Sabotage?

Do you really mean it this time? Are you going to get control of your life once and for all?

Before you go diving in to Getting Things Done or some other fail-safe system to organize your life you may want to check out Andy Wibbel's post, Planning is Not a Substitute for Progress. When I first read it I had to laugh because I was JUST laying out my BIG pad of paper, the one for my serious strategizing. Yeah, I'm old school. I like pencils and markers and graph paper. Even pencils you have to sharpen. Just like the smell of it all.

If you are like me, (and who wouldn't want to be,really?) it may be that just planning things gets you high.  Or maybe it's the Sharpie ink.  Don't you miss mimeographs? (43 years old, if you are wondering. I remember punch cards, too.) Or if you are ultra hip, maybe you are addicted to new technology and can't resist checking out new software.

Feed your addiction if you must, but don't be fooled. Planning is not progress. In fact, planning is a favorite self-sabotage technique of many a would-be successfully self-employed person.  Truly, if I hear about one more pretty Mind Map I think I'll leap off my roof. 

Key Distinction: There is a difference between ACTIVITY and ACTION.

Planning is an activity. It makes you feel like you have done something. Activity is the shallow stuff. Reorganizing your files. Making new folders. Cleaning your closet. Reorganizing your inventory. Reading e-mails and surfing (yeah, I know, it's "research").

It isn't that activities of this nature are bad, I'm a David Allen convert with my own new labeller to show for it.  But it is important to remember these activities are simply setting the stage for the real work and are not, in themselves, foundation-setting ACTIONS.  Actions are meaty. They get you somewhere.  They represent actual movement, integrated, results oriented, "you are now in a different place on the path" movement.

It's important to understand this distinction so you don't ask your new planning software to do for you what it cannot.  And what it will do for YOU is different than what it will do for ME, or ANDY, perhaps.

What function does all this planning serve, ultimately and what are the traps?

Some people fall in to excessive planning when they are afraid of stepping out. They don't feel ready, legitimate or fully prepared.  This is the "let me just read one more book" crowd.

Sometime we can confuse thinking with doing. Business people can also confuse things like revenue and profit. Being able to pick up on key distinctions like these can be critical! When there is a gap between one's internal image of reality and the actual external situation the resulting a blind spot can have significant negative consequences.  This is one place where coaches are particularly effective resources.

Sometimes we plan out of fear.  I've been there myself. Like a lot of self-employed people trying to build their businesses, I used to put things on my planning paper because I thought I had to in order to be successful.  Oh, Andy has a blog?  I'd better get one!  Oh, Andrea Lee has a book?  I'd better start writing!  Oh, Alice told me I need to read this book?  Must get over to Amazon.  Micheal Port is teaching classes?  Guess I should add that to my offerings, too.  What's this? No way can I make a living only doing 1:1 coaching? (Even though I have been for years!). Oh no!  I have to make a bunch of passive revenue streams! (Gets a little overwhelming, doesn't it?)

When fear, or simple lack of focus or confusion about what to do next was leading me, I was basically taking every good idea I saw,and accepting every prediction for my business by people who didn't know me as a new rule I had to follow and adding to my own list because I thought I had to model my success after every one else.  Coaches are notorious for this, and I see other self-employed people doing the same thing.  In fact, Americans in general can be prone to this.  Oh, Oprah said I need to do these 10 things for a happy life?  Put 'em on the list.  And, summer is coming...let me get those thinner thighs while I'm at it.

Do you recognize the camel here? (Start here for background on this.)

Remember this is YOUR list, first and foremost. It takes a certain amount of courage to ask the question but you have to be honest:

What do you (really) want out of life? 

How are the goals you are setting and the plans you are making relating to your values?  Are you setting goals based on your assessment of what you know to be true for you or on what others are telling you that you will have to do to "win the game"?  How are you defining success? 

When you have a handle on the answers to these questions (and they will change over time, so revisit them once in a while) THEN progress to these questions about organizational aids: What are you trying to organize and what function does writing things down serve for you?  Does it calm you down? Help you focus? Get you to do things? Help you identify where you need help or guidance? 

Once you know what you want and what you hope an organizational system will do for you then you can address the issue of which method will best help you to organize oneself.  Some folks love new toys and start using tools and systems before they really have identified their need for them.  It's not that different from buying kitchen gadgets.  Everyone needs an apple corer and lemon zester, right? And muffin tins.  And how about wrist watches?  Have to have one, right?  Well, I haven't owned one in years.  Every place I go, including my car, is full of time pieces.  Sometimes we assume we need things just because they are so common.

Let your need guide your hand here. 

Being a former time management flunkee and recovering "new system" addict let me share with you what I've learned. It comes down to knowing yourself and where you do and do not need structure. For myself, the fact is, once I have the concept of where I am going, I'm incredibly productive and writing a to do list just slows me down. 

What I have come to understand now, and it works beautifully for me, is that I am a visual organizer.  I think through my fingers and all those pretty markers and graph lines help my brain with conceptualization of my goals.  I have a serious freedom jones, however, so I know that putting down a formal to do list is the kiss of death for me.  I need the field defined, but not each stepping stone. Sometimes I want to walk on the grass, or cut through the brush.  Sometimes I LIKE learning things the hard way because once I've learned something, I KNOW I've got it.

Even when I thought I had a doable 'to do list' that wasn't overly restrictive, the fact is that when I am on the right path there is so much synchronicity that happens that I HAVE to abandon my original plans to accomodate the better opportunities that come along that I had no idea were going to show up.

What does this mean for time management?  For me, doing my conceptual work on paper includes asking myself the basic question WHY?  Why is this on the paper?  There's a nice supplemental article on this topic over at LifeHack, There's No Time.

Once I know the WHY, what I find I need is a flow chart and a general sense of my calendar.  Spring and fall will NEVER be times for big projects. I have an acre of perennial gardens.  I can't redo my website when the weeds start to come up or I'll regret it all summer long.  I always take a week with my husband to celebrate our anniversary, so June is out for major project.  Feb and March, however, completely suck in Chicago...what a great time for marrying myself to my computer, redoing my website, tweaking my infrastructure and writing book chapters!  The fact is, I have about six dedicated weeks a year (without scheduled clients, home/garden demands or vacations) to devote to big projects.  That's it.  Suddenly a year, which seems so long, beccomes much more concrete to me when I really look at the flow of the predictable demands.

And there will always be unpredictable demands like the time my mom and dad both had major health crisis within four months of each other.  Welcome to middle age, baby.  Better leave some wiggle room.

When you align yourself with the larger rhythms of your life and the natural world (like my garden seasons) and have a sense of your values, you become a much better gatekeeper where your goals and projects are concerned.

Better gatekeeper means less organizing to do.  You have to make friends with the concept of time and it's limits.  Time management is NOT about making more of it. It's not about turning yourself in to an efficient robot that never wastes a moment.  It's about learning to flow within the time that is available and recognizing that it is a limited resource.  It's about making friends with it.

Good luck!

I'm here to help if you need me! Laura Young / Wellspring Coaching

Comments

[Lyle]

Maybe my brain works totally opposite of yours, but I can't live without a to-do list. If I don't have one, I'll completely forget to do things that are important, or else I'll spend so much time worrying about them, I'm not getting anything else done. E.g., I promised to send a music file to a friend of mine so he could use it in someone's wedding. Then I forgot about it, and although he reminded me in an e-mail, my mailbox was full so I didn't read it until too late. It's not something that took much time - just a few minutes. I just needed a reminder. There's nothing "soul crushing" about it.

And today, I almost forgot to call a guy to see if I 1) he knew anybody who wanted to buy some concert tickets and 2) if not, if my friend and I could stay with him this weekend. It must have crossed my mental RAM 12 times this week. Having this kind of stuff in a list is exactly what I need, to make sure it happens ASAP, and doesn't get lost in the shuffle.

I really want to know how you remember all this stuff without a to-do list.

I think the key is to make sure what's on your to-do list is what you actually want/need to do, not to let it get too cluttered. (Which is pretty much what you said.) That's why David Allen suggests a someday/maybe list. To clear your main list of all the stuff you don't really have to do.

A flowchart? Are you serious? You must not be thinking what I'm thinking (http://deming.eng.clemson.edu/pub/tutorials/qctools/flowm.htm ). That sounds a lot more tedious than making a to-do list. I'd never get started.

[Lyle]

I'll also argue that without THINKING, you might be DOING all the wrong things. How do you know if they are serving your goals? Granted, I'm one of those "read one more book" types, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

[Laura Young]

Hi Lyle,
Great comments. That's exactly why I was saying how these organizing methods work will vary from person to person. We're all wired differently and drop the organizational ball at different points, or get mentally focused in different ways.
I seem to have a mind that is able to track lots of things without having to write them down but trying to organize the big picture is hard if I don't do it visually. My flow charts are not necessarily complex and covering all contingencies or choices in the scientific or technological sense of how they are used but they do organize me in terms of what set of activities flow in to which so I can line things up and leverage the effectiveness of my activities better.
So, my post here is an alternative view for folks so that they can check to make sure that they actually have the need that the tool is meant to be a solution for. Not all time management problems or organizational problems are created equal and sometimes you need part of a tool but not the whole method.
Your last comment is spot on for me. What I need is the visual process to help with the thinking part. Then the doing, for me, and folks wired similarly, goes effortlessly from there. Other folks are great on the front end but drop all the balls along the way.
Thanks for helping round out the discussion here!

[Lyle]

Sometimes, when I was a kid, I'd announce to my mom "I had something important to tell you, but I forgot it." Her response "If you forgot it, it couldn't have been important." I got frustrated because I didn't feel that was true. Perhaps that illustrates the difference between her mind's operation and mine - she tells me she remembers everything to do without lists. Everything I need to do is in my head somewhere, but I may need a list to retrieve it at the right times.

So for me, the list is a vital reminder of what needs to be done. When I need to change it, I have no qualms. For you, it's a pointless physical manifestation, which only serves to make it more difficult to change.

Keep in mind that when I'm talking about a to-do list, I don't necessarily mean a linear list. I do use those, but more effective is a hierarchy of what needs to be done for what projects, each item marked according to the context in which it can be done, e.g. at home, at work, running errands, etc. Essentially the Getting Things Done type of to-do list.

I'd like to see an example of the kind of flowchart you're talking about, though. If all the ones you have are too private, could you make up a sample one?

[Laura Young]

I'll be happy to share an example. May take me a few days to get it up but I think expanding this discussion with some concretes is a good idea. Thanks for the suggestion.
L