Episode 134- How to avoid perfectionistic planning of your week

 

Good morning lovelies, 

 

How are you today? Ok so today we are talking about perfectionistic planning of your week. 

 

So first of all, just for your reference, how would you know if you are perfectionistic when it comes to planning your week? If this is a problem you struggle with? 

 

One of the signs is that it takes you more than 10 minutes to plan each day. Or more than an hour to plan the whole week. 

 

Another is if you’ve stopped planning your week because it was taking you too long to do it. 

 

Another symptom is that you find it really frustrating when planning your week or overwhelming. Either because you feel like you don’t know exactly how the week is going to go, maybe there are some unknowns in it – and that makes it really hard for you to feel like you are making an accurate plan, or you simply feel like the task is huge and so feel overwhelmed by it. 

 

Another sign is that when your week doesn’t go exactly to plan, you get super frustrated with yourself or others or life in general – and/or you end up throwing the whole week’s plan out. A bit like when you’ve overindulged on sweet things on one day in the week, and because of this, you feel like you might as well throw out the diet for the rest of the week because you’ve blown it. 

 

Or lastly, it’s where you’re obsessing over your calendar. So it isn’t just a quick exercise to plan and then observe what happens. It’s constantly on your mind as to when you’re going to do things, how to create the perfect day, how to create the ideal week that will survive all seasons of life, all seasons of the year – and all circumstances. 

 

Those are typically some of the signs that you are perfectionistically planning your week. 

 

Now we don’t want to be perfectionistically planning our week because there are, of course, various problems associated with it. 

 

The first, is that we never want a tool that is supposed to be saving us time, to be taking more time than it’s saving. And there is a danger of this if you are taking too long to plan each day or week.

 

And usually when this happens, you will stop planning altogether because the payoff won’t be worth it – and then of course you get zero benefit from the tool. And all the same problems that you had before you started using it. 

 

It’s also not enjoyable if every week when you are planning you are feeling massively frustrated with yourself or others, or hugely overwhelmed. Or when we are in the middle of the week and it isn’t going to plan. This isn’t how we want our weeks to go – and it again completes overrides the benefit of planning if this is how you are feeling when you are either planning or things don’t go strictly according to the plan. 

 

And then the last problem of obsessing over it to try to create the perfect week no matter the season – is that your brain is using its limited resources and energy to try to do the impossible. Because no person’s schedule can ever be permanently fixed and not need to change through the seasons of life. And so it’s a complete waste of time and energy trying to create that. 

 

So if this sounds like you – here are some things that I recommend you try – in order to curb this tendency. 

 

1. Give yourself a time limit for actually planning. Whether you plan your week or if you are in my Time Masters program, and you are focused on using my 4-step TIME planning system to plan daily, you still want to decide ahead of time, how much time you are allocating to make decisions about the upcoming day or week. I’d set a timer for the first few times and eliminate all potential distractions just so we can focus on getting it done. And whilst the first few times you might have not completed it in the time frame, pretty soon you will have found your own rhythm and system to doing it quicker and quicker in order to get it done in the time allotted. That alone will help you be less perfectionistic, because you won’t have the luxury of time to ruminate on things and question as many things. I would also say here that if you find planning the overall week overwhelming, then focus on nailing the skill and habit of planning just one day at a time. Which will be quicker and less painful for you.

 

1. Accept at best that you are aiming to honour your calendar 80% of the time. And that 80% is gold standard. A bit like in school – getting 100% on homework or essays was almost an impossibility, but 80% was considered as awesome. An A grade.This will not only help you with planning because you won’t be so afraid to get it wrong, or to underestimate or overestimate or miss out something – but it will also help you feel less frustrated when you aren’t following it 100% – which means you will be less likely to think it’s a hopeless case and throw the whole plan out. 80% following a decent plan is still waaaay more useful than 100% of not following any plan. Same as 80% of the time eating a healthy diet, is waaaay better than not eating a healthy diet at all. 

 

1. For the unknowns – perhaps if you are factoring in other people into your plan and they aren’t forthcoming with their information, or perhaps you don’t know exactly how long something is going to take you, just take your best guess. Give yourself some buffer time around those things. And give yourself permission to be flexible. Your plan is only as good as the information is reliable. So you don’t have to beat yourself up or take longer than necessary ruminating over it to try to get it perfect. Sometimes it helps to give yourself some parameters to work within for certain things – but really in these scenarios I would rather you give yourself plenty of grace, look for patterns when they occur – so after you’ve executed the plan a few times and evaluated what actually happened – see if you can spot patterns and then tweak the plan next time accordingly. 

 

A simple example might be that you are driving somewhere for the first time and you don’t know how long it will take. Well you can quickly look it up on google maps, you can maybe do a google drive by to get an idea of what the entrance looks like, you can estimate if the traffic is going to be reasonable at that time or not, and you can allow a small buffer – in order to put the initial time down in the plan. But then after you’ve driven it a couple of times, you’ll have way more info on the usual driving time it takes and so you can plan better next time. 

 

Same applies if you are learning something for the first time – you can assume it will take you slightly longer at first, but then you will naturally speed up over time so that first plan is to get a sense of how much time you need initially and for the first few times, and then you can amend it as you get more experienced in it. 

 

If we are talking about planning around your other half, say, and they don’t know exactly how long they will be (and this happens to me all the time), err on the side of caution when factoring them in, allow extra buffer time and have a back up plan for if they are longer than you have estimated for. 

 

These are all considerations you can make that don’t take a ton of time and require zero frustration if you don’t let it frustrate you. 

 

1. And then lastly, you need to accept that your calendar will always have to evolve with the seasons. The seasons of the year potentially, and certainly the seasons of life. And even within that – women do have changes to their capacity and productivity that are linked to their hormones and their cycles – so an ideal week at the beginning of the month is not ever going to be ideal at the end of the month for us. So it’s worth factoring this in. And it isn’t worth obsessively trying to create a plan that will work no matter what. I know, because I used to do this. And so accepting this got me a whole lot of time and brain space and peace back. The better thing to do is look at the next month or few ahead, decide what your ideal would look like generally and what needs to happen to get you closer to that and then simply commit to revisiting that ideal every few months. 

 

And sometimes that isn’t even possible – where there is a huge life change happening for you – you simply don’t know what to expect and what would be ideal…

 

For example if you are moving country say (one of my clients is in the process of moving right now and so has no clue what to expect).

 

Another is welcoming a baby into your life – as I’m about to be. As much I would LOVE to know how much time I will have to work on my business and how much energy I’ll have or not have, and when I can expect her to wake up and nap and sleep…that would make a lot of things easier – I simply can’t know that right now, so creating an ideal weekly plan is not accessible to me right now. 

 

So to deal with that, I’ve accepted that to be true for now. I’ve given myself some space and time in my business for adjustments and to figure out what kind of routine I can expect to be working with. I’ve made a list of non-negotiables that if I could fit into my day no matter what time, would definitely be moving me towards an ideal week, and I’ve put some measures in place to help me get those things done. And the whole time, I’m still open to expecting the unexpected, to it being harder than I thought, and me not having an ideal schedule for a decent amount of time. And having that be ok for this season of life. 

 

The goal is not perfectionistic planning. The goal is using the tools available to us, to help us feel more in control and calm, to help us be more productive and be moving towards the life we want, and to help us have a work-life balance as we do that. 

 

So hopefully that helps you be more realistic with your planning, and following through with your plan.

 

So have a go, keeping these four considerations in mind. Let me know how it goes. And if you find that you are still not necessarily feeling in control and calm, or that you’re not as productive as you’d like, not necessarily creating the business results you want or having the work-life balance you want, despite your best efforts at planning, make sure you’re on my waitlist for the next round of Time Masters – just go to my website kirsty knight coaching and sign up on the work-with-me page so you can be the first to find out when the next round starts and so you get first dibs on the early bird offer for it. 

 

That’s it for this week. Happy planning. And I’ll see you next time.