October 21, 2007

• The Curse of Excess Planning

  In the course of my many years of writing, I have accumulated a fair number of quotes in my big “quote file.” When I look at the file today, I sometimes feel like I must have been a terribly naive person at some point, and yet there’s also a consistency there.

  There were a couple of “sayings” that jumped out at me, last time I was looking for a quote I thought I had.

  One was “It’s only too late if you don’t start now.” I don’t remember the context of the original quote, but I do remember liking it as an “antidote” to toss at all those who claim it’s “too late” for them to change their lives, take up a new hobby, find true love, get divorced, get into therapy or whatever else they may say as a smoke screen to cover the fact that they have decided they are only “marking time” till death, doomed to be eternal spectators in their own lives.

  The other was “You’ll never have more time than you do right now.” It’s similar to the first one, although contextually slightly different. This one addresses all those folks out there who are putting off and postponing the pursuit of what they truly want until they have “more time.” You know, “when I have more time, I’ll take up painting” or “as soon as I don’t have so much to do, I’ll start that fitness program.” A lot of people seem to fall into that one, busying themselves to the point of frenzy with doing the laundry every day, while blowing off opportunities to find lasting contentment in pursuit of their dreams.

  Of course, I am one of “them.” One of the ones who spent much of the first half of my life “planning” and “saving” things I really wanted to do for some mythical “later” that’s somehow more convenient than “now.”

  Now, I’m not saying that planning and waiting for the right moment– in and of itself– is a bad thing. I’m just saying that it’s easy to cross the line from mere ”planning” to “planning your way right out of living life.” And there are a whole lot of events and actions in life for which there will NEVER be a “right” time. The only decision is really whether to DO them, or not. Planning, alas, is an excellent procrastination tool… in that it allows us to pretend that we’re busy ”doing” something, even while the plans serve little other purpose than to postpone action.

  In the end, life isn’t measured by what we meant to do, but by what we did do. When we sit and take stock, there’s a lot of stuff that’s important, yet we only think about it. And we allow a lot of stuff that’s not really important at all, to eat up our time and bandwidth. Under my “old paradigm,” I would never have gone to that retreat in Colorado… I wouldn’t have gone to the one in California, last June. I would have said “that will have to wait till I can afford it.” But somehow I recognized that time would never have come.

  Figure out what’s important.

  Figure out what it is you really want. Not what you “should” want, or what “makes sense,” or what you “usually do.”

  Then do it.

  Be your dreams.

  Edited to add: I am NOT saying that planning, deliberating and waiting for the right moment is bad. I am just questioning the frequent practice of “substituting” planning for actually taking the planned action. I’ll give you a simple example from everyday life. Take a statement like “I’ll work on my resumé (because I hate my job) once I’ve tidied up my desk.” Many people who say this are just “avoiding.” After all, they manage to send 25 emails a day from the computer that sits on the messy desk. And they pay their bills, from the messy desk.  

  • 11:09 pm
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