The unexpected perks of making plans

Hi! 

I’m a planner. (If you’ve followed me for a while or read my book GRIP, that won’t come as a surprise.) As a result, I regularly get asked about the limits of planning your week. 

“Can you still be creative if your schedule’s jam-packed?

“Once you’ve made a plan, how do you deal with the unexpected?

“How spontaneous can you be if your week’s all planned out?

“Do you ever do things you haven’t thought out ahead of time? 

I believe that serious business demands a serious plan. If you simply work on what feels good at the time, then the odds of accomplishing anything of significance are slim. And I’m on a mission to show that making plans doesn’t have to be complicated, while the benefits are HUGE.   

Working in a more structured, mapped-out way is something you can see as an experiment. After all, you can always go back to how you do things now.

How do you combine a plan with the unexpected?

Sometimes work takes longer than you thought. Or new queries come in. Or a client or partner suddenly needs 100% of your attention. All of us have to deal with things we didn’t see coming. And yet:

Turns out it’s incredibly helpful if you’ve made a plan for your week and sketched the contours of your day. Why? First of all, having a plan makes you more critical of interruptions. You’ll choose to upend your own plans less often. When you’ve already established how you’re going to use your time, you’ll assess a request from your supervisor or a client not only on the urgency with which it’s conveyed, but also how it stacks up to your own priorities.

It works well, here, to think of yourself as being in that last busy week before taking some time off. Those are the weeks where a solid plan and clear priorities really count. 

And there’s a second reason having a plan helps rather than hurts you when the unexpected comes up: You see at a glance what you have to reschedule. When your calendar reflects what you want to be spending time on, you know immediately who you need to notify if plans change. And less falls through the cracks. It’s a great feeling to change your plans with confidence, secure in the knowledge that you’re not overlooking anything.

Finally, a critical question: Say you never have to change your plans when unexpected work lands on your plate. Could it be that you’re perhaps not getting the most out of your time?

Can you still be creative if your schedule is jam-packed?

When people ask me if it works to schedule time for creative tasks, I like to turn the question around. Are you satisfied with how creative you are and how often? Are you happy with the amount of good ideas and original thoughts that occur to you? Often the answer’s no. Some people may feel they’re not great at coming up with new ideas. Others want to make their creative work more of a priority.

In my case, those winning ideas usually don’t pop up during the time I’ve reserved for working on them. I see that time as more like laying the groundwork for good ideas. I try to be actively involved with the topic and to feed my brain. Those thoughts then continue running in the background and at some later point—on my bike, in the shower—I’ll have that flash of inspiration and bingo: a fresh idea.

This way of working has changed my sense of my own creative powers and what it means to be creative. For me at least, creativity isn’t something that just happens, but it always benefits from taking the time and laying the groundwork.

How spontaneous are you? Do you ever do something on a whim?

To be honest, that’s not my strong suit. I’m learning, and I’ve found it helps to free up days in my schedule where I can just be off. That’s only possible because I know things are running smoothly the rest of the time. But yes, you could ask yourself whether what I then do on such a “free” day is truly all that spontaneous. 

To that I’d say: experiment. Roland, for instance, tells me that he loves my method for workdays, but that I’d better not touch his downtime. Feel free to make that kind of distinction for yourself! By all means, find ways to combine your serious work with some serious spontaneity.

When you generally work without a plan—simply taking care of what feels good to do at the time—that’s a sure sign you can get more out of your days.

Here’s a good way to gauge that:

When you look back over the past couple months, can you think of one or more big things you’ve made a lot of progress on? If not, then it’s worth it to see where you can add a little structure to your week.

Have a good one,

Rick

produced by the language girl