Do you obsess about your future plans? Do those plans fail to come to fruition?

Are you spinning your wheels with your plans and not taking enough action on them?

I’ve wasted hours upon hours trying to craft the perfect plan for everything. More often than not, this practice is mental masturbation. I do the same thing over and over again to get that dopamine hit.

I’ve learned to think differently about my plans. Planning is important but it’s often not about the details as much as we think it is.

Know When To Stop Obsessing Over The Details

What is the general purpose of a plan? The dictionary definition is “a scheme or method of acting, doing, proceeding, making, etc., developed in advance:”

Acting.

Doing.

Proceeding.

Making.

Notice these verbs in the definition. Planning by definition is acting from intentions you set in the past.

If you are always resetting your intentions. You’re not planning. You’re intending.

You’re filling yourself with potential energy that will never be used.

The purpose of a plan is to outsource your future-oriented thinking to allow you to live in the present.

A lousy plan that keeps you present is better than an almost-perfect plan that you keep obsessing over.

A plan is a target. Adjustments will happen but our adjustments come with the same intention of hitting the same target.

Instead of obsessing over how something is going to get done, focus on what needs to be done and do it any way that you can. Often when we get lost in the how it opens us up more to make excuses to not do the what.

The arrow doesn’t seek the target. The target draws the arrow.” -Matthew McConaughey, Greenlights

Find Your Target

When you make plans, you are creating a theoretical target. Large plans are inching towards that target with smaller targets.

Adjustments will be made along the way, so do not get discouraged when you do not hit your early targets.

Perhaps you have a goal of running a marathon in a year. Part of the plan is to run a 1/2 marathon in 6 months. You end up missing that first target of running a 1/2 marathon in 6 months and it becomes 9 months. This is when it’s time to reassess if you need to make adjustments towards the bigger goal. Do you need 18 months now to run that marathon? Is there anything you can do now to make sure you still hit that 12-month target?

Follow The 10% Rule

If you have a plan to start a side business or a plan to get in better shape, do not spend more than 10% of your allocated weekly time planning.

For example, if you’re training to run a marathon and that takes 10 hours a week of training, do not spend more than an hour a week reworking the plan. In fact, your time should probably be even less than that. Spend more of your time hitting the road or trails and getting faster.

Constantly staring at our plans hoping to find something that can be slightly better isn’t doing you any good.

There will never be a plan that will be to the level of perfection where effort in the action will seem frictionless.

Have Patience

How often do you give up on your plan before actually testing it? Have you started a new workout regimen and a week in you decide to give up on it before you see results?

Set a hard time frame you want to give yourself before going back to the drawing board.

If you’re training to run a marathon, give your plan at least three months before assessing if it’s working well for you. We live in a society that wants results as fast as a Google search. Reality doesn’t work this way.

Anything worth striving for will require patience.

I hate going into something blind. Over the years, I have obsessively tried to create perfect systems and plans for myself with the hope of achieving some magic undiscovered point.

I thought once my productivity system was dialed in, all anxiety would seize to exist.

I was wrong. You are the productivity system. You are the plan. If the plan is to write, then write. If the plan is to write ideas down, write ideas down. It’s not rocket science. It’s about finding your road map, taking the drive, and finding the best way by doing.

Planning is a necessity when it comes to achieving a goal. Without one, you will be aimless in achieving a goal. If you somehow achieve a goal without a plan, you either got lucky or have a strong sense of intuition on when to take your next steps.

Instead of focusing on the how focus on what needs to be done and your how will be easy. If you’re training to run a marathon and it’s pouring rain outside, you may not have the ideal conditions to go for a speed workout. Instead of being rigid and forgoing your training altogether, adapt and get in what is the most ideal for that day.

No plan will perfectly account for the thousands of variables that can throw you off. A plan will give you a structure to allow you to adapt to the variables when they come.