The following guest post is written by the incredibly talented Abby of Life by Grit. If you like my style, head on over and check her out immediately! I recently wrote a guest post for her on having the perfect Get Your Sh*t Together Day (GYST DAY!)
“Failing to plan is planning to fail.” - probably not Ben Franklin
A little bit of planning is an essential part of success in any pursuit. Those first steps that you take to plan and organize for something new can make or break your project, but there are a lot of pitfalls to avoid in the process.
Having a good plan helps you push through when things get difficult, making you more likely to finish what you start. A bit of planning also helps to ease your fears and quell your excuses. As someone recently said to me, I challenged their excuses and proved “that they don’t stand up to a well made plan.”
On the other hand, I have seen planning and research quickly turn into procrastination time and time again. Often, we’re afraid to actually start on a new project and allow ourselves to research endlessly because it feels productive. It feels like we’re making progress, rather than procrastinating, so all we ever accomplish is endless research. At some point, planning has to stop and action has to start.
Having a process for how to plan and organize before you start a new project helps to prevent procrastination. All you’ve got to do is follow the steps, and they’ll lead you right into action.
Step 1. Brainstorm
There are a lot of ways to brainstorm. One of my favorites is through the use of creative questioning. By asking yourself outside-of-the-box questions, you force yourself to think about things from a different perspective and often come up with new and better versions of your original idea.
A lot of my brainstorming happens while I’m journaling as part of my morning routine. Unsurprisingly, writing things down helps me to come up with new ideas and modify old ideas to make them better. I often come up with solutions to the problems that I’m facing while I’m journaling.
No matter how you go about it, brainstorming helps you come up with a new idea if you don’t have anything in mind yet, and refine your idea if you already have one. Before you get too far along in the planning process, do a bit of brainstorming to make sure that you’ve figured out what it is that you’re pursuing.
After you’ve come up with an idea and have a general direction that you want to work in, it’s time to take that idea out of your head and finally turn it into something real.
Step 2. Find your Why
Before we get too far into this process, it’s important to find your Why. Take time to figure out why you want to undertake this project and write it down somewhere that you can come back to it often. This will serve as motivation when things get tough. It also helps you to check in with yourself and make sure that this is something that you want to put time and energy into.
Your why may consist of a specific list of reasons, or it could be a little more vague and philosophical, including things like, “I want to see if this is a good fit for my life,” “I want to learn more about myself,” “I want to see if I can,” and the classic, “why not?”
These reasons need to be things that resonate with you and mean something in your life. If the best you can come up with is “Everyone else is doing it,” maybe that’s not a project that you should undertake. Finding your Why should leave you feeling excited and motivated for the thing that you’re taking on.
Step 3. Do a little research.
When you’re first starting a new project, research is usually the first real action that you have to take. It’s hard to get started when you don’t know what you’re doing. But, as I said before, research very often turns into a tool for procrastination.
If you know that you’ve used research as a way to procrastinate before, I highly recommend establishing a research deadline or setting a timer. Depending on what you’re setting out to do, typically you’ll need somewhere between an afternoon and a weekend to do the research—unless you’re doing something big, like adding an addition onto your house. That might take a bit more research.
Establish a research timeline, and when you’ve reached the end, it’s time to move to the next step.
If you’re not sure where to start your research, I like to go to Reddit first. It may sound a little odd, but there really is a subreddit for everything, and there you’ll find plenty of knowledgeable, unbiased people who can help you get started. Reddit has helped me with everything from learning to bake bread to establishing a skincare routine.
Go out in search of people who have done whatever it is that you intend to do. There are lots of people out there giving advice about things that they have no experience with. Find someone who has done what you want to do, as well as people who are in the process of doing it, and learn from them.
Step 4. Plan it out.
Unsurprisingly, this is where good old calendar blocking makes an appearance.
Start by breaking your project into manageable steps. Rather than trying to tackle the entire project in one giant leap, which is intimidating and allows little room for reflection, divide it into chunks that make sense so you can tackle one piece at a time.
Once you’ve broken the project into smaller mini-projects, establish a deadline for each piece. This helps to keep you moving forward at a steady pace, rather than waiting until the last minute to do everything.
From there, break out the calendar and start figuring out when exactly you’re going to work on this project. Will it become part of your morning routine? Do you only have time on Saturday afternoons? Decide how much work you want to put in each week and add those time blocks to the calendar.
Now is a good time to verify that this project is feasible. If it’s going to cost money, see if you have room in the budget for it. Do you have the time and energy for it? If your calendar is packed full as it is, it might be better to push this project back to a less busy time.
If it’s necessary, don’t feel bad about pushing back deadlines to make the project fit your life. We often choose ambitious deadlines because we want to see results quickly, but starting a marathon at a sprint pace isn’t going to lead you to success.
In fact, I like to build room for error into my plans. Say I have a project that I expect to take six weeks—I’d plan for an extra week or two at the end in case things don't go as I expect them to. And most of the time, they don’t. That wiggle room might just save your butt.
Since we’re discussing how to plan for the unexpected, one of the most reassuring and helpful things that I’ve done while planning is to create plans for what you’ll do for the three things that are most likely to go wrong. You can’t prepare for everything, but creating a few contingency plans ahead of time helps you stay on track when things go wrong, rather than quitting. You’re better at shutting down excuses and thinking clearly in the planning stage than you are in the moment.
For example, say that you’re just starting to live a more active lifestyle, and your plan is to go for a thirty-minute walk after dinner every day. What are three things that could happen that would interfere with your plans? Well, it could rain, you could create dinner plans with friends that flow right into another activity when you’d normally be walking, and you could have a busy day where you don’t have a free half hour after dinner to walk.
And what could you do if those things happen?
If it’s raining, you could walk up and down the stairs in your building, find a mall or other public space to walk around, or do a simple bodyweight exercise routine or some yoga in your home. There are plenty of YouTube videos to follow.
If your dinner plans turn into plans that last all evening, you could invite your friends to go for a walk with you, do a bodyweight routine when you get home, or find time earlier in the day to go for a walk if you know ahead of time that dinner might run late.
If you have a busy day, you could commit to walking for 45 minutes in the days before and after to make up for it, or find a way to multitask so that you can walk while doing other things like making phone calls.
Things will go wrong sometimes, and this is often a quitting point for people. What can you do to set yourself up for success in the sticky moments?
Step 5. Get organized.
Getting organized and setting yourself up for successful project management are going to look different depending on the project, but in my experience, the simpler the system, the better. Don’t go running out looking for a fancy organizational system when it isn’t needed. You’ll make things unnecessarily time-consuming and complicated.
All of my projects are managed using one of three tools: Trello, Habitica, or Google Calendar.
Trello is a classic, well-known project management system. Cambria and I both used Trello for our life audits. It’s good for more complicated or long-term projects with lots of moving parts and steps that may vary from day to day. I’ve found my life audit board helpful in keeping track of projects that I know I want to take on one day but don’t have time for right now.
For the simplest projects, I just throw them on my Habitica. Anything that can be handled using a to do list or by repeating the same action every day gets added to my Habitica. This keeps it fresh on my mind and incentivizes me to complete it without being needlessly complicated.
Everything else goes onto my Google calendar. I plan out all of the necessary steps and calendar block time to do them. If some things can’t be directly blocked onto the calendar, I’ll use Google Keep (a note-taking app) to make a note of them.
Don’t overcomplicate things. Overcomplication is often used as an excuse.
As you work through your project, take time regularly to look back at what you’ve accomplished so far and how things are working out. Self-reflection and analysis of our progress are essential because they allow us to modify plans that aren’t working. I check in on my goals weekly as part of my weekly review.
This regular check-in, at least for me, is just as important as the initial planning phase. It helps to keep me on track, make sure things are progressing, and figure out what is and isn’t working as planned so I can make adjustments as necessary. Depending on your project, you may want to check in with yourself more often, possibly even daily, or less often, like once a month.
Step 6. Dive in.
I’ve said this before, and I’ll be saying it until I die: nothing changes if nothing changes. All of the planning and organization in the world won’t make a difference if you never act on them.
If you wait until you feel 100% ready, you’re never going to get started. No one ever feels 100% ready to start; that’s normal. If you’ve made it this far and done all of the planning, you’re ready to just dive in. You have contingency plans in case things don’t go as expected, and you have regular time planned to check in with yourself and make sure things are going as you want them to. You’ll be fine.
Take a deep breath, and go for it! :)