Planning doesn’t mean success

Planning one’s work is promoted in the corporate world as the best way to stay “on target” and to achieve goals. Some folks even promote planning—inappropriately, in my opinion—as a surefire way to “succeed” in one’s personal life. For many of us, at one time or another we may find that simply waking up in the morning is a huge success, never mind checking things off a plan. And yet: We may persist with what’s possibly an illusion that planning helps.

A month ago today, I talked about making a list of future blog posts. The idea was that it could help me keep on track with posts tied to certain dates or events, and I specifically mentioned my Weekend Diversion – 1984 Series because I could write and schedule them all in advance: All of the publication dates are fixed and the content of a post is unlikely to need changes before publication. On the whole, this list thing has been successful.

Over the past month, I published posts about all but one topic I’d listed. I did combine two posts into one, but I kind of thought I might do that when I wrote the list. I also have another post I’ll publish later today about an anniversary today, something that was also on the list. I did, in fact, write and pre-schedule publication of this past Sunday’s post ”Weekend Diversion: 1984, Part 4”—except I wrote it only a couple days beforehand. Even so, it was published on schedule, and was ready to go in advance, and achieving that was the point.

Looking only at my goal of making sure that I published certain posts, especially ones with fixed dates, then the planning succeeded. However, I intended that the list was only a staring point, a list of the basics, the things that I wanted to be sure to publish. There are now 35 such posts on the list.

However, I’d always intended that I’d also publish posts about everyday sorts of things, too, but that hasn’t happened as often as I thought—though maybe “hoped” is a better word. For example, I’ve been working on a post about a topic that began two months ago, and I still haven’t had a chance to finish for a bunch of reasons (including the fact that I no longer turn on my computer every day…). There are several more posts that haven’t even made it as far as the draft stage.

I said in my post last month:

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.

Creating a list of blog posts by month has definitely helped me, but there’s clearly far more going on than just my inability to finish non-scheduled posts I want to publish, especially posts I do on the spur of the moment. The plan, such as it is, may have helped “preserve the spontaneity that I've always enjoyed”, as I also said last month, but I certainly haven’t taken advantage of that.

On the other hand, I and this blog are still going, so, by that measure, it’s all a huge success. That’s why I think that my list of future posts will probably help in the long term. Hopefully that won’t turn out to be an illusion.