Planning your time is like choosing to dance on beat
Planning your time means choosing to do all or some portion of the things you want to do on a specific schedule or cadence. The regular 15 minute, 30 minute, 1 hour, 1 day, etc. time increments are like the regular beats of a song. Every chunk of time that passes is another beat that drops. You’re not obligated to dance on beat, but it looks and feels a lot better when you do.
More flexibility, not less
While it can initially feel constraining and even scary (Planning your time is scary), like it reduces degrees of freedom, what you invariably find is that there’s actually still a lot of flexibility, even conditional on being on beat:
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If anything, ingraining the idea that you should dance on beat, getting so good that it becomes natural and routine, and then mostly forgetting about it, expands the range of possibilities. Once you commit to being on beat, it doesn’t actually cost you much at “runtime”. Likewise, committing to doing things on a schedule doesn’t cost much once you get over the initial activation energy and skill required to create and stick to the schedule.
What initially feel constraining eventually just becomes the air you breathe. You look with puzzled amazement at people who can’t dance on beat – they look strange and alien to you. Something is clearly “off”. Likewise, once you successful achieve intentional planning of your time, you’l look back on your prior self with amazement and wonder how you ever lived that way.
Getting good
It does take work initially – it’s not a free lunch in the beginning. Ironically, what eventually will feel totally natural initially feels quite unnatural! Never fear – this too will pass. Just keep doing it, and eventually it will lock in place.
As with dancing, if you fall off beat, recognize that this has occurred, pause, find the beat again, and then get back on it. This cycle of losing the beat and finding it again is itself a form of training. Likewise with your work – falling off the plan, failing to plan at all, these are things that will happen with some regularity in the early days. Gently “get back on beat” – there’s no shame in it. If anything, noticing that you are off beat and coming to that conclusion yourself without the help of others is one of the greatest wins you can have in the early days. Not everyone can even do that.
References
Deep Habits The Importance of Planning Every Minute of Your Work Day
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