I mentioned before that I moved from my beloved Bullet Journal into a Daily Passion Planner. I am now on my sixth month of this journey and I am honestly still pretty glad that I made the switch. There are some things I miss. I miss my monthly spreads and my weeklies. I’ve found ways to add similar structures to the Daily Passion Planner, but I kind of also wish they existed there already. I’ve started using a lot more washi tape, as well. I guess there is no way to stop me from getting in my own way by creating unnecessary work for myself. But in general, it has been a good time.
One of the ways in which it has been a good time is that it’s forcing me to be even more intentional than before about how much I try to get myself to do in a single day. The planner is set up for at most 13 todo-list items. Now that is technically a huge list of things. BUT I come from a history of adding 20 or so things on my list over my weekend days. Like I would routinely fill a page with a todo-list. A lot of the time, I would get most of it done, but there would always be stuff left over. And it bugged the snot out of me.
So, lately, I’ve been trying out this thing where I’m only ever allowed to add 3 things per day onto my plate while I’m still planning it. This particular week is an exception because I lost basically all of last week’s productivity to sleep deprivation and I’m trying to catch up. So, for this one week, I’m adding four things per day onto my plate. And only after I’m done with those, am I allowed to add more to the list, but only one thing at a time, and then the next one only after I’ve dealt with the previous item. And so far, that has really been working well for me. I have a tendency of blaming myself for not being productive enough and that’s never a good plan for being productive going forward.
But it’s also really easy to lose my way because I can’t do everything all at once, which means that I have to choose. Like I did with the certification and the studies relating to passing it. For a set of reasons not relevant here, I had a limited time to get it done. I had planned to take the test around the end of the year, but when that plan did not work out, I had to shift everything else around to suit the new timetable for that. I had meant to start querying Cold Burn Goodbye by now, but instead, I’m not even close to having finished all of the edits. But I have finished that certification. So that’s something. And it was one of my big goals for this year.
And that dichotomy is something that I sometimes struggle with. I have a tendency to want everything all at once, and even more so if I work for it. I’ve made a plan and if I had just managed to stick to it, oh think of all the things that I would have. But now I can have those things out of order if I stick to the changed plan. It is way too easy to decide that I have not managed to get anything done because the original plan no longer stands. But plans never do survive first contact with the enemies of procrastination, changes in circumstance, and the simple fact of only having 24 hours in a day (RUDE!). Maybe it’s enough to plan the work and work the plan, three items at a time.
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