I’ve been doing a lot of planning because it’s the end of the year. This is something I do every year, where I start to think about where I am, where I’m going, and try to plan out the next year. One of the things that I always try to remember to do, but often fail to do, is to plan with myself in mind. I’m making this video as a reminder to myself that I need to do this.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come up with the most perfect plan. Seriously, flawless. And then, that plan has met reality and it’s all crumbled to the ground, usually immediately. In fact, the last plan I made for my new and improved schedule now that my office is all done lasted a grand total of half a day before it was disrupted. And guess who hasn’t gotten back into it?
Planning is easier said than done, but I wanted to talk about something pretty specific today, and that is how to plan with yourself in mind.
The reality is that life is hard. There’s a lot that goes on that we just cannot account for. There’s no way to know when an emergency is going to come. There’s no way to know when you’re going to get sick. There’s no way to know when life is going to conspire against you. And instead of trying to plan for perfection, I think it’s often better to plan with yourself in mind. That is to say, to plan for disruption.
I tend to set high goals, and often those goals are borderline unachievable. I’ve talked about this in the past, why I set goals like that, why I’m so aggressive in setting my word count goals, and so aggressive in setting the total amount of work that I need to do, but one of the things that I’ve been trying to do recently is set those goals with a realistic expectation of myself.
I have these periods where I have really, really high production. And I mean really high production. 120,000 words a week plus. But then I also have periods where things don’t quite go that well, whether it’s because I just have not wrestled my way through the story yet, or I’m still sort of subconsciously processing everything, or life is just really busy. I have four kids, a house, a dog, a wife, and a lot of other social obligations. The result is that there are times when I just don’t have concentrated periods of, you know, eight to 12 hours every day to write.
Sometimes those disruptions come right in the middle of everything else that’s going on. For instance, if one of the kids has a doctor’s appointment, and another kid has to be somewhere at the same time, and it happens to be in the middle of my workday, guess who’s not working and driving their kid to the doctor? That’s me.
Instead of allowing that to throw me off completely and just obliterate my plan, I’ve started to try to build in some leeway into that.
To add a further layer of complication, there’s another problem that I often run into. Me. See, I’m not always good about doing my work. In theory, I’m great at it. I can say to myself, okay, Seth, you’re going to wake up tomorrow, you’re going to do four chapters before noon, you’re going to do two chapters afterwards, that’ll leave you plenty of time for all of the other admin stuff you need to do. You’ll still be able to contact everybody, you’ll still be able to have a great day.
Then I’ll wake up the next morning, and I’ll get my coffee and I’ll come downstairs. And I’ll get one and a half chapters done and I’ll watch some YouTube. Or I’ll start reading something and then I look up and most of my day is gone. It really throws a wrench in the plan when the person who’s supposed to be doing the work just can’t manage to do the work.
From talking to other people, this seems to be a fairly universal sort of challenge. It seems that most people have this struggle of being able to plan what optimal looks like, but then have trouble executing on it. And so again, that’s why I’ve started to plan with myself in mind, understanding my strengths and my weaknesses.
I think it was Sun Tzu who said that the general who makes the most calculations is the one that wins the battle and that the key to victory is understanding the enemy and yourself. I definitely think that this applies when we are planning. If instead of focusing on what would be optimal, I take into consideration my strengths and my weaknesses, and I plan my routines and my days to take into account that some days I’m just not going to be feeling it, and I’m not going to be able to produce at the level that I might want to. It’s going to take a huge amount of burden off of me.
Now, there are periods of time where I simply don’t have a choice. I might have a contract deadline. I might have a personal deadline, and I just have to sit down and muscle through and do the work. Actually, I operate really, really well in those circumstances. But you know what doesn’t help me? It doesn’t help me if I have a really rigorous production schedule, and then I just fail to meet it a whole bunch of times because it reinforces all these negatives in my head.
Instead of doing that, I’ve been trying to take a slightly more relaxed approach, trying to account for the fact that I’m not always going to be able to do everything I want to do. And most of all, I try to give myself a little bit of grace.
I’m a big fan of living a life of grace. Not just for other people, but for yourself as well. Giving yourself some leeway when you don’t do as well as you want is much, much better than beating yourself up for it. I know as someone who has really struggled with not liking themselves and not liking where their life is, how hard it can be not to get down on yourself when you aren’t doing what you want to do, when you aren’t living up to that high expectation that you have set for yourself. Believe me, I lived there for a really, really long time.
In recent years, I found a lot of power in living in grace and giving myself grace when things don’t turn out the way I want and when I don’t take the actions that I feel like I should have taken. In having grace for other people when they’re not cooperating with my great plan for how life should go. Grace in understanding that sometimes you just get sick and you can’t do as much as you wanted to do. Sometimes your brain just doesn’t work. Or sometimes the pressures of life are just too strong and you’re not in a space to be creative.
We don’t ever want to stay in those places and we do want to take action to walk out of them. But having grace for yourself when you are in them is incredibly freeing.
So what does this grace actually look like? I would say that if you’re living a life of grace, the predominant thought running through your head is, okay, I failed, but I can get up and keep going one step at a time because I will get there.
As you take a look at your life, as you plan your next year, I really hope that you can do so in a spirit of grace. That you can give yourself grace when you’re not living up to your own expectations. That you can give other people grace when they’re not living up to your expectations.
YouTube Video Link: https://youtu.be/yQFFy-KVuqI
Thanks for reading and watching.
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