Traditional planning doesn’t work for me
I have struggled for years to plan “the right way.” I mapped out a five-year plan and then narrowed that down to what I needed to do within one year. Then I divided that work into four quarters and carefully mapped out the first quarter before setting up my monthly goal plan. I even broke that down into weekly plans and made nice and neat little daily checklists.
Those checklists wouldn’t get done. I have had the same goals for multiple quarters, even multiple years. As things piled up, I had even more lists and bigger plans and I tried to do everything at once because it all felt important.
I know all the tips, tricks, project planning strategies, and tracking systems to keep me accountable and focused on my goals, but I have struggled to find a system that actually pushes me to do the work toward those goals. I can make a plan. I can make an amazing plan, if I do say so myself. I can make it look pretty, I can make it look motivating, I can even make it look exciting and enticing.
But I don’t do the work. Why? I have asked myself this question so many times. Now that I understand myself better, there are a lot of reasons why traditional planning doesn’t work for me. I could write an entire article just on those, but in a nutshell, planning is the only executive function with which I was blessed, perfectionism keeps me reaching for the highest outcome of every project I strive to tackle, and procrastination keeps me from doing anything at all.
The Procrastination merry-go-round
There are three reasons procrastination impedes my efforts. One, I always think that future Shawna is going to have everything together. Her poop is in a group, so to speak (the PG version of saying her sh*t is together). She has completed all the things and she did them all at the same time. Decluttering, home repairs and remodeling, accomplishing massive improvement on the bass guitar, mastering many Yoga positions, walking all three dogs separately each day, staying within budget, and volunteering at Celebrate Recovery once a week; all while keeping up with dishes, laundry, housework, dinners, a forty-an-hour-per-week job, and several hobbies were no match for her. So, I pile all the projects on at once, thinking that I need to work on them while they are still fresh in my mind.
Second, life happens. No matter how beautifully I plan out my year, something comes along and junks it up. The bathroom has a leak, and we are tearing out the drywall, the dog gets super sick and suddenly you have two months of constant vet appointments, or my boss throws a project on me that I was not expecting. You know how it goes; you are alive too.
The third problem that procrastination brings has to do with traditional planning methods. I can sit down and map out all the projects I want to complete in a year, break them down into quarters, then months, and weeks, but the deadlines still seem so far away. I think, “Oh, it’s only January, if I don’t get this done right now, I still have two months before the deadline.” A quarter seems so long, but somehow, I still think I need to tackle everything at once so things are done before the end of the year. I know, my brain is weird.
What’s the solution?
So, a quarter is too long, but a month feels too short, I have an overloaded plan, have neither the time nor the mental bandwidth to finish things, let alone start half of them. And forget about down time. Any time I sit down to rest, I feel guilty about neglecting my actions list. This has been a cycle my entire adult life. I cannot tell you how many times I have rewritten the same goals over again for the next quarter, the next month, even the next year. It is exhausting.
Another struggle I have had for years is monthly versus weekly planning. How do I navigate migrating to a new month when the last day of the month is on a Wednesday? I want to have that week already set up ahead of time, so my months were not really months to begin with.
A few weeks ago, I randomly clicked on this article (https://medium.com/@ashleeberghoff/why-six-week-cycle-planning-is-the-best-a1cacf32b7a4) changed everything. It talked about cycle planning rather than monthly planning. This article was specifically about businesses, but as I read more, I felt a lightbulb click on. No, more than that. Butterflies flitted in my heart, flowers bloomed in my February frozen soul, and I am pretty sure I heard the voices of Angelic choirs singing “Ahh” in achingly beautiful and intriguingly complex harmonies. This made sense.
What is cycle planning?
Basically, it is just what it sounds like. Instead of planning out your year, your quarter, and your month, you plan six weeks at a time. Why six weeks? Because it is longer than a month and shorter than a quarter. Suddenly, I felt the burden of getting everything done all at once lift from my shoulders. I could focus on a few projects this six weeks and the other projects could wait until the next with the assurance that they would get done soon enough. The biggest beauty of all, though, is this cycle planning is designed to give you one week of planning and prepping, four weeks to buckle down and get to work, and one week to rest.
How many of us rarely give ourselves time to rest before we are on to the next thing? I never do. So now, I can tackle six to ten projects, one or two large projects and four to eight small, and then take a well-deserved break without the guilt of everything else hanging over my head.
As soon as I moved into this system, I suddenly did not feel the need to completely plan out my year from January to December. I made a list of all the projects I need or would like to do and categorized them. You can use whatever categories work for you, but I chose the following:
Time sensitive: needs to be done in the very next cycle.
Cycle specific: a project that needs to be done in a specific future cycle.
Spiritual projects
Personal development projects
Projects that benefit or affect my marriage.
Projects that benefit or affect my family and friends.
Home environment projects
Finance projects
Mental health projects
Physical health projects
Career projects
Fun projects
And projects that I just want to get done for me.
Now, when it is time to prep for the next cycle, I can look at this list, prioritize, and pull a few projects for the next cycle.
Focus and Clarity
Another thing I realized as soon as I was setting up my first cycle is that, no, I do not have to do everything all at once. Even if things are important to me, they can become a smaller project while I focus on other things. No, I do not have to practice my bass guitar every single night to make progress. I can do Yoga four times a week instead of seven and still reach my health goals. I do not know why this was such a lightbulb moment for me, I am sure many of you already understood this concept; but with a yearly plan I always felt rushed to do all the things at once. Now, I am breathing deeper and resting easier because my plan is achievable.
Lastly, I realized just how many odds and ends projects I was putting on myself on top of the carefully laid out quarterly or monthly plan. They all need done, but I was adding things like “catch up on paper clutter” on my actions list on top of already trying to do too much. After looking at my actions list that I had set up for my first cycle, I realized that these items are also projects that need to go on my list, and I can forgo trying to get them done while I am focused on other things. I immediately felt myself sigh in relief as I pulled those miscellaneous projects and added them to my master list. Of course, there is still the one-off task list of items that should be done within the next few weeks, but they are things like “make an appointment with the eye doctor” and the like. Completely doable even if I am working on other things. For the first time in my life, I am not overwhelmed.
But what if the New Year falls in the middle of a cycle?
I still love the idea of a fresh new start in a new year, so I am going to start a new cycle the first week of January, but how? Another great part of planning in six-week cycles is that there are a few extra weeks in the year. There are eight six-week cycles with four weeks left over. Planning a vacation? Create a seven-week cycle so that the week is included, but you are doing all the work in the other weeks.
For instance, my anniversary holiday falls in the middle of cycle four this year, but I have just worked around it, adding an extra week into that cycle so I do not have to worry about getting things on my list done while I am on vacation; and I still have four weeks to for my projects. I think I am going to take the week of Thanksgiving off as well, adding another week into that cycle, and taking the last two weeks of the year off entirely so I can relax and enjoy the holidays. Of course, there will be the regular stuff like home maintenance, but I will not add extra projects on top of that during those weeks and I will start 2025’s cycle on Monday, December 30th with a week of prepping and planning.
Is the system perfect?
Especially for us non-neurotypical folks, I don’t think there is a “perfect” system because nothing is going to actually do the work for us, which is what we really want. We want to take the easy road and have things naturally happen for us. Then we don’t understand why our plans don’t work out. What we need is a system that is easy enough that we can use it without too much trouble or effort. For me, at least, I think this is it.
There are a few challenges to planning in cycles instead of months, though. I will need remember that bills are due more than once before I move on to the next cycle. I need to track appointments and future plans while paying attention to which part of a month falls into each cycle. Difficult? A little. Doable? Absolutely.
Did I tweak the system?
Not at first, but in the second week of my first cycle, I did. I thought about trying to set up the new cycle in my bullet journal while already in the new cycle and I felt hyperventilating coming on. I create multiple spreads to start a new cycle, or in the past: month, and trying to keep track of my weekly and daily goings on while creating all of those to plan out the projects for the cycle terrifies me, frankly.
Now, I decided to end one cycle with the week of planning for the next. That way, setting up my bujo and all the projects and spreads that will be in it will be a natural part of the project planning process. The next cycle will begin with the actual work. So, I will work for four weeks, rest for one, then plan the next cycle during the last week of the current cycle.
What do you think? Could this work for you too?