subject: Are You Planning To Drive Yourself Crazy? [print this page] We have all heard about the value of planningWe have all heard about the value of planning. From the time we are pretty young we are told that we really need to plan out our day, our weeks, our month, and, as we get older, pretty much our life. Some of us are better at it than others. Some of us will take it to the extreme planning out our every minute. Some of us will take it to the other extreme and not even bother to put anything on a calendar.
Most of us are somewhere in the middle. We try to get at least most of the activities on some kind of calendar and we try to get everywhere we are supposed to be and get everyone else where they are supposed to be. We keep meaning to put a time on the calendar to plan our activities, but we have so many activities, that we never really get there. So, we become more reactive than proactive.
The potential for craziness is particularly great when things are really busy. You start to look at all the activities that are coming up in the next week or two and you wonder how you are ever going to make it. You wake up at night in a cold sweat thinking that you have forgotten something (or even worse you have a nightmare that is the day after the big spring tournament and your child did not get there because you had it marked on the wrong day). How do you keep your planning from driving you and everyone around crazy?
First, have a calendar system that you trust. There are lots of electronic calendars out there. Some will work with your phone and some can even coordinate with another person's calendar (your significant other, for example), so you all know where everyone is (or at least should be). These are great if you trust the system. If you don't have a way to back up this calendar, then the ultimate disaster can happen if your computer crashes. Many of these systems are web-based, so that is not too much of a worry. What happens if you lose your cell phone and that is where you keep your calendar? Could you at least get through the day? Do you have access to your online calendar to use while you wait to replace your phone? Some of still use the pencil and paper method with a datebook. This method is also fine, particularly if you don't have access to electronic media on a regular basis. The danger of this is, of course, if you lose the datebook there is no way to recover the information.
Second, don't look at your calendar too far out. If you start to look at all the activities for an entire months, you might break out in a cold sweat just thinking about it. For a large event, make a to-do list of the things you need to accomplish for that event, but spread out the last over several days. A to-do list will help with those times when you wake up in the middle of the night and think of something. (If you do wake up, just take the time to get up and write down what you thought ofyou'll sleep better after that.)
No matter how busy you are, try to make some flexibility in your schedule and some contingency plans. What happens if your babysitter backs out at the last minute? What happens if you realize you were supposed to be somewhere 10 minutes ago?
Above all, stay calm. You can't make time change. If you forget something or you are late, just try to recover as best you can and just move on with rest of your day. As the saying goes, "Don't count every hour in the day, make every hour in your day count!"
Time is what prevents everything from happening at once. John Archibald Wheeler
