Flailing to plan

A popular aphorism came to mind recently: “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” It’s been popular in business (mostly for managers), but it’s often applied more generally, even as somewhat dubious life advice. The thing is, it can be true, and, I think, it certainly is for me much of the time. The aphorism came to mind precisely because I’m trying to move from flailing to planning.

How much the stuff I produce for this blog is read has never been my metric for determining “success”—in fact, I almost never even think about checking the stats. Sure, I want people to read what I publish, but I’m quite happy even if only one other person (aside from me…) reads a post, and I’m even happier if they find something useful in it.

My personal metric of “success” has always been raw output: How many posts did I publish in a month or year? I haven’t achieved my old goal of an annual average of one post per day for several years, and, on the whole, I’m fine with that. However, there have been numerous things I don’t post about, though I wanted to, and that’s where a little planning can help.

The first thing I did was to make a simple list by month of various posts I want to be sure to do, and some that would be nice to do. For example, I have my “Weekend Diversion – 1984” series, each of which has a set date for publication. I also listed topics I’d like to remember along with things I (maybe?) couldn’t possibly forget. At the moment, that list has only 29 posts on it—it’s merely about being able to plan for posts that have specific publication dates. In this way, I can pre-write posts (like for the “Weekend Diversion” series) well in advance, not the least because most of those posts are at least based on historic information.

I’ve never been particularly good about planning posts in advance, certainly nothing like Roger Green does, but it would be useful, and probably much easier on me, if I took care of planned posts in advance (obviously, I can still make changes right up to the date of publication—after all, I sometimes make changes a long time after publication).

I started thinking about this because as I was writing my post about my father’s birthday, I realised how I’d almost always forgotten to write such a post, and I knew there had been others over the years I’d also forgotten.

Last year, I tried to devise an organisation system for my blog and podcast, but nothing I came up with made any sense for me, how my brain works, and for my work style. A simple list may be too simple, but it should do the basic thing I want: Keep me on track so I get date-specific posts written and published on time.

This, of course, does absolutely nothing for the vast majority of posts I work on during a year—written and published, or not. Those are still in a state of chaos, but maybe that’s the compromise? Tracking and planning for posts with specific publication dates will, at the very least, free-up some head-space for other posts, and aslo preserve the spontaneity that I've always enjoyed.

None of this means I’ll get anywhere near my goal of old, and I’m still okay with that. I know that having something to keep me on track with posts for specific publication dates will also take some stress of me, too, since I don’t have to try to remember such things. In fact, that same motivation was what led me to design my personal organisation system, too (and that system turns one year old later this week).

No one ever plans to “fail”, however they measure that, but plenty of people don’t plan to help themselves “succeed”, however they measure that. Over the past year, I’ve learned so much about what works for me, what helps me to “succeed”, as I define that, and I definitely feel better for having put a bit of energy into frameworks to help me plan so I don’t flail. I don’t “succeed” at everything by anyone’s measure, but most of the time I succeed by my definition, and that’s enough.