the premises of your plan
Recently in calls with clients, I find myself digging into the assumptions and premises that form the foundation of any one person's plan to move a project forward.
For example, say a client comes in and says "I want to make a plan to finish this piece before I start teaching again in September." And I ask "what plan do you think will get you there?" or "what do you have so far?"
"Well, if I write 1k words per day for the rest of July and half of August and then revise 10 pages a day in the third week of August and then footnote and format everything and do every step for submission and my writing group gives me feedback in 24 hours or less, then I will be able to submit it on August 31 and also I have given myself 12 flex hours to spend how I wish between now and then."
[This is an exaggeration, obviously, but only slightly ;) ]
And so, as coach, I start to dig in:
"What outside people or things is your plan dependent on?"
"How many hours are you expecting to put in a day?"
"Where is your buffer time?"
"Have you ever worked at this pace before?"
"What things will you be doing to take care of yourself during this period? When will you fit them in?"
Try asking yourself these questions about your plan for the week, or the month, or the project as a whole. And if the answers are alarming, adjust!
Plans are just drafts - they're your best guess about how something might unforld, and what milestones you need to hit in order to make that happen. They aren't contracts you sign with your future self, nor are they they only possible path forward.
So if you find yourself in a cycle of making plans, getting off track, making new plans, and feeling pressure because of it, it might be time to examine the assumptions you're making about yourself, your collaborators, and the world that inform your plan. The best plans are those that reasonably address and accomodate for the conditions on the ground, not the perfect conditions you want, or wish, to have.
good, better, best: setting some parameters for goals/tasks
Have you ever looked at something - a goal, a task, a project - and thought:
I guess I'll just make something up? All I can see is the perfect option or doing nothing at all?
I have! Because there are a lot of things (like word count goals, levels of doneness, how many vegetables to eat) that vary widely! And when we set 1 (singular) goal for those, it turns into a binary - we made it, or we didn't.
Recently, I've started using the good, better, best framework to set some goals or plans for the day.
For example, I want to move more, and if I write "run" in my schedule, I either do that, or I don't. Mostly I don't! Because lots of things sound better the process of learning how to run longer distances! And that leads me to not do ANYTHING to move my body, and then it just gets harder the next day. So instead, I write down three things:
Good - a walk around the neighborhood with podcasts
Better - a YouTube exercise video
Best - a run
and that way, I have choices - and I can see which I have capacity for, and I don't set up a situation where I either have to do a very hard thing (for me), or not do anything at all.
You could try it with writing goals, like this:
Good: open up document and address a few changes from supervisor
Better: do some changes and write the new paragraph
Best: restructure the other section
That way, when you sit down and your brain NOPES right out of a big, complex text like restructuring, you have other options. Or, if you really want to BE THE BEST!, you can aim for that.
Don't like the good, better, best hierarchy? I totally get that! Ranking causes all kinds of anxiety, so you could also try naming them in these ways!
Choice 1 / 2 / 3
Cool / Warm / Hot
Shallow / Medium / Deep End
Strong / Stronger / Strongest
Toe in / Dunk / Swim
(whatever colors feel useful to you! colors are very personal!)
The goal is to give yourself choices and ways out of the all or nothing paradox - especially when perfect / all / best might not be available! Because something is almost always better than telling yourself that perfect and nothing are the only two choices!
a year is very long, and other thoughts on planning
first things first, try as i might, i simply cannot quit the new years resolution industrial complex. i love the freshness of a new year, i love the optimism it brings, i love an explicit chance to believe in my capacity to change and grow.
however, long, long gone are the days in which i would sit, at the cusp of a new year, and list out every single thing i wanted to do and change about myself, and then embark on a near manic quest to do so many of them at once that i would be fully and completely exhausted by january 15, if not earlier. and if there was any inkling of that behavior left, the pandemic well and fully knocked that out of me.
and judging by the response that dr. jane jones got from her tweet, we’re all tired. and from where i sit, in january 2022, there’s quite enough uncertainty about the way the year will unfold for anyone to feel a little uneasy planning for the whole year.
a year is a very long time. a pandemic year - even longer. so, here are a few of my most important ideas and tools for thinking about, and actually planning, in a time like this TM:
plans are just drafts of what you think you might do with the resources you think you might have available. they are, like any good draft, subject to revision, further research, and the whims of the (cosmic) editor. making a plan in january that doesn’t fit in march, or november, isn’t a sign of failure - just a sign that you may need some tweaking to reflect any changes.
once more for the people in the back: plans take into account the resources you have - time, energy, support. how many of us have written a plan for 100 hour work weeks when we really only have capacity for 30? how many of us plan for a year where teaching happens equally week to week and then get totally surprised by the crush of work at midterms and finals? the more realistic you can be about your resources, the less you have to adjust. but, following point one, an adjustment isn’t a failure, just a revision.
i myself have leaned hard into seasonal/quarterly planning and resolutions. this is an idea that i learned from sarah faith gottesdienercts.com/pages/about and it make so much sense to me. we might have an overarching goal for the year (like, finish the dissertation) but how that translates into daily, weekly, or monthly rhythms is very likely to shift, change, and evolve as time passes. so rather than trying to pick a resolution (like writing every day) that works in january when classes are still ramping up but not in april, when you’re swamped, you pick just for the next season. my winter resolutions often have a lot to do with supporting myself through the cold, dark months, and my summer ones are usually more buoyant. i change all year long. so do my goals. it makes sense that my habits and resolutions do too.
you can also slow the planning process way, way down - or plan to revisit it often if you do it in a more compressed way. maybe you decide on your big three projects/focuses for the year, and then every month you make a plan for the individual steps and when/how you’ll do them. maybe you wait until the second week of the semester and you get a sense of your students and work load before you decide on a writing schedule/habit. the more information you have, the more specific the plan - and the more specific the plan, the more useful it is.
above all else, planning is a way to help make some decisions (what’s important, what to focus on, when to do it, how to do it) in advance to reduce decision fatigue. if your plans leave you tired, or even more confused than when you started, i encourage you to focus smaller, more actionable, more concrete, even if that means abandoning the year long view and only visiting it from time to time, while you keep your gaze firmly on the daily/weekly. it all adds up - little bit by little bit. let your plan help keep you moving in the direction you want to be going, even if you need to improvise a little bit on the exact route to get there.
how do you want to feel?
I love a good goal as much as the next person. Run a 5k! Write on the blog once a week! Get to one million followers on Instagram!
But, the older I get, the more I realize that there are lots of things that I want to do, but that the actual activity or goal or achievement isn't the motivating part. And even more importantly, I don't feel nearly as good as I want to even if I accomplish the goal if I'm miserable the whole time I was working towards it.
The goals just don't feel as good when I'm only focused on the outcome, and not the process. And the easiest way for me to tune into the process is to pay attention to how I'm feeling.
There's a popular planner that a friend recommended to me - the Desire Map Planner - which I ultimately had mixed feelings about. BUT I loved the core prompt:
What are you going to do today to feel the way you want to feel?
The idea is to pick "core desired feelings" - but you can also think about them intentions. How would you like to FEEL this year?
My feelings for 2020 are:
Grounded. Capable. Engaged.
I might have enrollment goals for Thrive, for example, but when I'm doing the marketing and writing blog posts, I want to *feel* engaged. I want to feel like I'm doing that work on purpose, that I have something important to share, that it means something to me. So that way, if I hit my goal, then I did it because it was authentic and came from me. And if I don't get there, then I still can rest knowing it was authentic, and it came from me. I felt the way I wanted to feel while I was working, and that counts. It means that I'm giving myself permission to feel the way I want to feel WHILE I work on things, WHILE I try to achieve my goals, and not as reward for afterwards.
I definitely won't feel grounded, capable, and engaged every minute of every day this year. But I have the goal of feeling that way when I can, how I can. I have a place to aim for. I have a bar to measure myself that isn't about achievement, that isn't about metrics, that is a little more in my control. I might not be able to fully control my enrollment metrics, but I can offer myself a five minute meditation when I'm feeling anxious about it, to get a little more grounded. It's a different way of thinking about taking care of yourself.
How do you want to feel this season? This month? This half of the year? What makes you feel that way? How can you build in checkpoints for yourself around how you're feeling, and not just what you're getting done?
a few ways to plan your day
A few weeks ago, in a different life, I had a system of daily, weekly, and monthly tasks that kept me pretty well in line. I knew what things I did on Tuesday, and what things I did on the last Tuesday of the month - and even if there was a little bit of a shift (I was sick or I had an appointment or whatever), I knew what I had planned to do, so I could make it up.
Now I'm in a whole new world where a lot of the assumptions I made about where I'd go, what I'd do, what resources I'd have access to are no longer valid. Do Tuesdays still exist anymore? Hard to say!! And yet, there are still things that need doing, and I apparently need to do them, so I've been experimenting with a few new frameworks for thinking about tasks. I'll put them here in case some appeal to you - with my normal pandemic reminder that now is a time for flexibility and experimentation! The conditions for many of us keep shifting, so therefore, we will probably need to shift how we think about our time and our work.
Three things - This is a model that I've seen recently on Instagram, as popularized by Elise Cripe. You purposefully pick smaller things when you're feeling overwhelmed with a big thing, and you let yourself focus on just those. You know that there are other things to be done, but you do the little things and you re-establish your identity as a person who does some things sometimes!
Top Three - Another variation, used in a lot of planners. You put the three most important things in your top spot, above all the noise of the rest of the list. It's a way of visually pulling out the highest priority items so that you can focus on just the smaller section first, and then move on if you have more time.
Day block goals - My days have been separating into three categories lately - before lunch, after lunch, and after dinner (MEALS ARE LIFE) - and it has been helpful to pick a goal for each block. The trick to this one is that I can only have work items in two of the three blocks - one has to be a rest/self care/fun/family thing. It doesn't necessarily have to be the last block of the day, but it does have to be there.
Start here - My brain has also been VERY FOGGY in the morning and after breaks, so before I switch tasks or shut down for the day, I pick somewhere to start. It isn't usually the most important, or the hardest thing, but it really helps ease me back into my work when I really really don't want to. Past me picked where to start! Thanks past me!
Next thing - Sometimes, when I'm at my most overwhelmed, I drop into what I call "next thing" thinking. For example, I might get up and see that the kitchen is a disaster. Instead of letting myself make a list of everything in the whole house that needs to be cleaned, getting totally overwhelmed, and then not doing anything, I just pick the next thing. I wash this mug. And then, I wash the next mug. Then maybe I wipe down a counter. But I only focus on the next, most readily apparent thing. This is particularly helpful when my anxiety is really high - just focus on one thing, and then the next thing, until I can feel a little more grounded.
Be gentle with yourself - what worked before might not work now. But just because *that* way of working isn't as effective right now doesn't mean that NOTHING will work - it just means you have to embark on an experiment to see what can be useful in these conditions.
staying in the middle
i am a devotee of planning - my planner is on the list of “must come along” things when i leave the house, back when i left the house. i have long had a rhythm of daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly planning that’s helped me visualize my time, understand project rhythm, break down huge goals into smaller chunks, stay on track and make informed choices about where my time goes hour by hour.
and right now i can’t really stand to look at my planner. i have brought it out on my desk a few times, even opened it, and it’s so full of what i thought this year would look like that i spent an hour getting out the important stuff (project names, future dates) and then put it on a shelf.
for a few days, i went on gut instinct - after a few years of my business, i know (generally) what needs to get done in a week, and i have a pretty good memory for deadlines, and i’m still on top of my email. but it was stressful to have to remember everything, and i felt like i wasn’t making any progress on anything that wasn’t on fire and hugely urgent - which just means that when those things did become urgent, i would be behind.
the last two weeks though, i seem to have found a sweet spot - a set of weekly goals, and my daily schedule sheet. just enough structure to keep me on track, but not so far into the future that i’m going to have to redo it if my schedule changes, or if the conditions change, or if something happens.
here’s how it works:
at the end of the day on whatever the last day of my week is (usually friday but some work has been drifting into the weekends lately), i save a half hour to sit down with my notebook where i’m writing everything down these days.
i look over all the old to do lists, the notes from meetings, and the scribbled notes to myself and copy all the open tasks and projects onto a new page.
i put dates on things that need dates, and then i close that notebook for some time off - even if it’s just an hour or two!
when i sit down to start my week, i make notes about which things need to happen first - and estimate what days i might work on the things that are flexible.
and then when i start each morning, i fill out this sheet. sometimes I print it out, and sometimes i copy it out, but the sameness of it helps me feel a little grounded.
at the end of the week, go back to step one!
if i’m clinging too tightly to what worked in the past for me, then i’m faced every day with the gap between what i thought april 2020 would look like and what it is like. if i go without any structure at all, then i’m drifting without any anchor at all. there are days when the idea of working a “normal day” feels like a complete, disrespectful fantasy, and there are days when a few hours of work when i’m in the zone feel like a tiny corner of the world that i can control. i’m just trying to stay in the middle - a kayaker putting in a few strokes to the right, a few to the left, to ride the current as best i can.
How to make plans when everything keeps changing
One week ago today, it was my birthday. And I planned a most amazing day off - I went to workout at my favorite barre studio, I had a tasty lunch, I spent a fair bit of time strategizing and big dreaming about Thrive PhD in Quarter 2 of 2020, I went to go see a show downtown. At dinner, my husband and I discussed the news and wondered aloud if things would start changing.
Readers, they did.
I’ve made six news plans in the seven days since, and all of them have been smart, and well considered, I’ve had to scrap them all.
All in all, we’re very lucky - I have the space and privilege to take a breath and try and figure out what comes next. But I am still more distracted, more anxious, more bananas than I can remember being in a long time. And from what I’m hearing from friends, colleagues, and clients - that’s all of us. So here are a few things that are really helping me to make some plans and find some structure even as things change by the hour:
I am abandoning the idea that I’ll be able to plan effectively more than a few days at a time. Now is not the time to embark on my quarterly planning tasks! It is not even really the time to set up big monthly goals, at least not specific ones. I’m planning my days and my weeks so that I have some structure to my time, but I’m letting go of the idea of planning as a way to maximize achievement for right now. It’s planning for structure and sanity.
I made a list of all my open projects and put them into three categories:
I need to work on this to keep it active
I’d like to work on this
I am okay with pausing this
This is letting me see a little more clearly where my time and focus (when I’ve got it) should go. I’m also committing to revisiting this list often as the situation changes - as my resources change, this list might change too.As I sit down and plan my week and my day, the time goes first to the “I need to work on this” stuff. I also am scheduling in NON-NEGOTIABLE breaks and self care. Just because I am home all the time does NOT mean that it is healthy for me to work all the time. If I have time left over (ie, I’ve gone through and put in all my appointments and scheduled work sessions) I am leaving it blank right now. In other seasons of my life, I would have scheduled other activities, but for now, I want the flexibility that those “buffers” afford me.
I am, for the sake of my brain, treating this as a “new normal” as opposed to a time limited scenario. For the first few days, I was spending A LOT of time and energy trying to figure out how long these conditions could last or when I could put in a “back to normal” date in my calendar, and it was really wearing me out. The date kept shifting, and my anxiety kept growing, and I kept trying to read more news to get more data for planning, and it was not a good cycle. So I just decided to make my plans with these constraints until further notice.
I’m also being really honest about what my emotional and physical restraints are. I am not functioning at 100% output right now. I don’t know of many who are. So this is not the time for me to say “in a good week, I can do 20ish hours of focused writing.” Halve it, and start from there. Maybe quarter it. Set reasonable goals, and adjust if you have to. Setting unreasonable goals and then not meeting them will only make you feel worse.
“Welcome back” is the mantra I use in my Thrive PhD community and I’ve been sharing it around a lot lately. If I step away from my work, if I’m unexpectedly away from my desk, if it suddenly becomes necessary for me to take a day and just be numb for a while, I say to myself “welcome back.” Not “how will you make up for that break?”, not “was it worth it?”, and not “did you deserve or really need that time away?”. It’s just “welcome back”: welcome back to your work, welcome back to your desk, welcome back to your communities, welcome back and let’s try again. We will all need breaks. We will all have things come up that we couldn’t have seen coming. The best thing we can do is welcome ourselves back, when we’re ready.
All we can do is make the best decisions we can with the data we have at the time, and then adjust. The data is changing. The situations are changing. All we can do is try to make smart decisions, and adapt.
These are strange times. I honestly do not know what will happen - all I know is that if we treat this like a fun, indefinite work retreat, and then beat ourselves up for not writing the next great novel, or not getting extra research papers written up, or not perfectly homeschooling our kids while we try and teach remotely, we’ll have missed the point. The point is not to use the changes in the way we structure our lives to work more, the point is to be aware of the fact that this situation is bigger than our deadlines, and all we can do is try our best to keep surfing the waves as they come.
How to bullet journal!
I am a digital native, and now with my laptop/smart phone combo, I can run almost 100% of my life from keeping track of appointments to tracking my water consumption. I realized halfway through my undergraduate degree that I didn't really need notebooks anymore - all my notes were on my computer, and that way they were searchable as well. By the time I got to my fellowship year in my PhD, I hadn't used a paper planner since my last year of high school but yet, I found myself craving less screen time. After years of different planning systems and experimenting, I've landed on a system I like - bullet journalling, with a daily planner - and I'm sharing how I work in the hopes that there are ideas you can use, too.
I use a modified bullet journal and a daily planner to keep track, on paper, of all that I want to track and accomplish on a day to day, week to week, and monthly basis. I will write more later about how I use a daily planner - including ways to replicate it digitally - but today will be focusing on my bullet journal, where I do my monthly tracking, long term planning, and goal monitoring.
What is bullet journaling, you ask? Here's a video put together by Ryder about how to set up the system:
What I love about the bullet journal system is that I can change the system however I'd like based on how my needs are shifting. I use collections the most often - I use them to organize notes about my business, books I'm reading, plans for weekend trips, tracking workouts or meditations - and find great satisfaction in looking back and seeing month by month how things are shifting and growing. Here are a few of my favorite spreads, with notes on how I use each of them.
Self Care Tracker
This is my self-care monitoring tracker that I've been experimenting with. The legend on the side corresponds to the different lines. Every morning, I assess how I felt in each area on a scale from 1 to 10, 10 being great. As you can see, the beginning of the month was hard for me (I have a pain condition that is cyclical, and knocks me out for a few days a month) but this is very useful for me to see the correlation between all the various aspects of my life.
Business Tracker
I use this to track my business as I grow it, but you could easily adapt this to dissertation writing or any other long term project with multiple parts. I like that I can visually see if I'm favoring certain tasks over others and that I can "get credit" for making little bits of progress every day. Blank squares are of course scary, but it helps to see that just because I didn't do anything one day doesn't mean that I didn't do anything all week/month.
Water and Meal Trackers
I am actively working on eating more regularly and drinking more water - so I created two trackers this month to visualize those goals. I might incorporate these next month into something that lets me see the correlation between eating/water intake and my energy so I can have direct feedback on effects.
Sleep Tracker
This is one of my most time-consuming spreads to set up every month but honestly, I find that making these spreads is therapeutic in a meditative sort of way. I just love the way it looks when it is complete, especially since regular sleep and routines is a huge indicator of my overall health.
Chore Running List
I use this kind of a spread to keep track of all the things I want to get done (in this case, around the house) but never remember to do. When I have time set aside to work on the house, it is so much easier to flip to this spread and see a list of things I meant to do than to just blindly do whatever came to mind first. I can see how this could be adapted to list books/articles you want to read, professional development tasks you want to follow up on, films to watch....
Reading Tracker
I made a personal goal of reading 50 books this year and I made this spread to see how I was doing with that! I've seen other people write titles they want to read on the shelf and then color them in when read but I like reading whatever I want and I didn't want to stop coloring once I started.
But what I love most about the whole system is that it gives me a few minutes every day, off my computer and away from my phone, to check in with myself and see what is working, and what isn't. My professional self mixes in with my personal self, just like real life. Plus, fun pens and colors!!!!!
For more inspiration, check out the Bullet Journal Blog! Or Reddit and Instagram have huge bullet journaling communities too!