How does one get satisfaction from life is one doesn’t plan? In my life I’ve planned lots of things. But somehow in the last years, it seems to have become a blur of reactivity. Almost zero planning is going into my own personal life and even very little is going into work too.
This became an issue when I saw a keynote speech at a small tech conference at a community college recently. The speaker has gone on a curvy path to where she is now as a CEO of her small company delivering consulting for new AI projects after having worked at the FAANG gang for a while after having gone to MIT after a very different career.
She put up a slide that said:
- P – Prepare
- L – Learn
- A – Adapt
- N – Navigate
And I feel like this has been a call to get me out of this stream of consciousness I’m going through buffeted by the bumpers and winds of needs and requests whether biological, visual, temporal, physical, financial, occupational, or scrollable.
My old saying is “I always think of a great birthday gift as I’m driving to the party.” My creativity is there in the moment, but it’s always late (to the party), and I’m not sure what to do with that!
Generally, when I even start to thinking about planning, I get lost in a whirlwind of facets of thoughts and end up never even feeling like I started doing anything. And suddenly it’s hours later having accomplished things, perhaps unconsciously moving forward to some value based destination, but in no memorable or measurable way, especially once we’re out of the realm of work, where at least we’ve got Jira and actual goals.
Apparently time blocking can help with this, but I find that blocks can be missed drastically easily. And then what is one to do? It’s like working out: If I don’t do it immediately after dropping off the kids and walking the dog it just doesn’t seem to happen “later” because there is a structure in the day broken up by kid shuttling, weekly events, meeting schedules, lunch o’clock. Injecting a sweaty exercise into the mix just doesn’t fit.
I figured I’d attempt something to break the endless pattern leading to eventual death never having planned anything more. This is how I arrived back at the blog, writing once again about the dilemma not taking action ON the dilemma.
Why? Well, with my digital fartprint spanning the decades and archives, how am I to truly find and/or summarize and/or achieve any sort of launch?
Should I start with a blank piece of paper? Or by collecting every principle/value/goal/mission/bold statement/utterance/post/tweet I’ve made in the last half a century and feeding it into an AI for distillation? And what of the (medicated) person I am now versus who I have been in decades past? Is it even a valid thing to NOT start with a blank page? And me with my utterly shit memory, requiring me having to rehash details over and over most everything I’ve learned before, how can I somehow capture my essence into in some way that I can use it to project into the future?
Almost anything feels like a Möbius strip. I find myself on a smooth path forward, and before you know it, I’m on the OTHER SIDE of that path going the other direction?
For instance believing in a strong federal government pushing states to its will. Until one day that federal government is infested with fascist insects, and then practically thanking Jesus that we have state’s rights.
Forced to choose to stay on a side knowing that most likely there’s a dissuading case around the corner is basically anathema. But what is the result? Instinct and reactivity, which is just as bad (though more efficient).
In other words, even choosing to lock down on something or not is itself a möbius! There is no rational choice for either.
Where does that leave me, bleeding inspiration, opportunity, regret, past actions? I suppose I’ve been operating with minimal strata. Some sense of fixed values leads to frequent small and short-term decisions. With no planning in between. And often those values are betrayed. I have a sense of when my values are being overridden when I start biting my fingernails. Is it my subconscious telling me I’m off track? Or is this something else entirely? I’m not biting my fingernails now at least.
This Is what happens when I have an actual day off and can stop and think without distraction for more than a couple minutes.
I asked ChatGPT about it all. As always it provided very precise and grounded suggestions. It looks like there’s no way around not allocating daily time, weekly time, monthly time, for thinking, meditating, reviewing, assessing.
Should that be documented? 15 minutes every day? 1 hour every week? Where does this get captured? Here? Notes? Reminders? Jira? Slack? Trello? Confluence??? The list goes on, and this is just the surface.
So I think it starts by creating space. Not a blank piece of paper, not guided meditation, not stretching or doing anything, just ripping out a swath of nothing. In other words the goal is to put the “jaws-of-life” into my day and start cranking it open leaving a gap that I can squeeze into.
A recent segment on the radio I heard was about doing “nothing”. Until I have created the pure gap of nothing, I don’t think anything will change. But perhaps once I do have a 15 minute gap where I intentionally do nothing, then I can start to create stronger boundaries around that time and ultimately repurpose it for the good ol’ “Solitude and Planning” (see Franklin Day Planner training).
So let’s start with that. Just two or three minutes a day doing nothing and then start widening the gap until I’ve got a consistent nothing window of at least 10 minutes a day.
Let’s see how that works eh?
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