Planning During Uncertain Times

In my last article, I discussed why you should be planning for 2021. In this article, I want to go into what you should be planning for and begin to discuss a little about how you should do your planning.

There are thousands of things that you work on throughout the year. Do you want to map out every aspect of your life and your days? Or, do you prefer to really focus on certain areas that you may be struggling with or that are more important?

There are certainly pros and cons to all of these approaches, and one may fit you better than the other. For me, I can become obsessed with tracking everything. So, I have to limit what I track and plan for, or I will quickly get overwhelmed and ditch the entire process.

If you aren’t going to track or plan for every meal to come for the next six months or for exactly when you will begin and end each book you want to read, what do you need or want to plan for?

I like to track progress toward and plan for that progress on a few major goals for the year. When thinking about 2021, I have identified the following goals:

• Work more on my artistic and creative side

• Work more on personal relationships

• Spend more time reading and less screen time

These are my bigger or more over-arching goals for the year. I then take those buckets and break them down into one or more ways to meet the desired goals. For each of these, I am planning on the below:

• Work more on my artistic and creative side

• Publish an article weekly on Vocal, Medium, or my personal blog

• Restart my podcast

• Resume language learning

• Work more on personal relationships

• Spend more time talking with friends. This will have to wait for the pandemic to end for in-person conversation but there is always the telephone and Zoom

• Write more letters and send more cards

• Spend more time reading and less screen time

• Read 100 books in 2021

• Limit screen time to work hours or time spent watching with friends and family

Now that I have more granular tasks and goals, I will begin the actual planning-documentation process. I want to start with an agnostic approach to this. So, whether you use an app, a calendar, or any other method, you can tailor this to your needs. I am also not going to outline all of these here but give you an example of how you can go about this process for your goals.

Of my list above, writing an article weekly is one of the most important. I very much enjoy the process of writing and find it relaxing and refreshing. So, I really want to put as much structure around how I plan for this as possible.

Frequently, we set a goal—I am going to go to the gym 3 times per week. When we don’t feel like getting up on Monday morning, there is always Tuesday through Thursday. Then when Tuesday morning rolls around, there is always Wednesday through Friday. And on the pattern rolls until we decide that the week is lost--we will start over next week. Of course, we skip a couple of weeks in a row and decide that really is something we should start as a New Year’s resolution for next year.

I do not want that pattern to happen for me and my projects or you. Set out with definite days and times that you can commit to. If you are not a morning person, don’t put your writing time at 5 am. You will not succeed. If this goal is vital to you, you may even have to decide to forego another goal or to move the goal later into the year.

As I said in the introduction article, I tend to change goals throughout the year and need a sense of change and novelty to maintain my interest. That does not allow me to plan for writing Monday at 5 pm and Friday at 2 pm and put that down in my yearly planner for the entire year—at least not in ink. It does give me the freedom to understand that I have bite-sized chunks of the year to get through for each of my desired goals.

My current plan has dedicated time Monday at noon and Friday at 4 pm to accomplish my writing goal of one article per week. I will put my initial thoughts down on paper on Monday--I may do a bit of editing throughout the week—and then finish it up on Friday for submission.

As the year goes along, I may need to alter those times but will always pencil in another hour if I am forced to use my dedicated writing time for another purpose. If I also begin to not enjoy this hobby, I will look to my remaining items and substitute it with another goal like painting or getting back into photography.

Now that you have a flavor for the process, in the next article I want to introduce you to a few ways I have planned and scheduled over the years. I will finish with my latest experiment in planning and let you know how successful I am at using this tool to accomplish my goals over the course of the year.

If you haven’t read the first part of this series, please check out the link below. Check my other stories out on Medium, and feel free to follow me on Twitter @docwilderness.