Just Go With The Flow
Planning your day might not be helping you
Don’t you just love the sense of security that comes with planning your day?
It’s a common routine for many, including me. Some people plan early in the morning, some people plan in the evenings for the next day — people plan differently, but they all do it to achieve the same goal: finality.
Ticking the final task on your to-do list gives a pleasing sense of completion, and even making those plans in the first place makes you feel more determined to clear out your inbox, or finish reading the next chapter of that book.
Having our lives in order by a series of bullet points and words is oddly satisfying, all up until you miss a task.
You forget to send that email to your colleague, or you miss out on finishing that article, and you pick up your task list at the end of the day and realize — not every objective there has been ticked off.
People experience this through a different range of emotions — for some, it’s crushingly disappointing, for others it’s frustrating beyond belief. But everyone can agree that the failure to achieve your daily tasks makes them feel uneasy.
What’s the solution? How do you avoid that sense of mental unrest from the disappointment of not fulfilling your goals?
This, of course, is easier said than done — a businessperson is most likely going to need to achieve some order in their lives — but one solution is to simply go with the flow.
As humans in modern society, we admittedly plan too much. We naturally have the insecurity of incompletion, and this seeps into our daily lives as well. Now, if we don’t achieve the objective we set in the morning, our annoyance runs across days, and even weeks.
Instead of planning your whole day before it even starts, plan gradually throughout your day. This way you can be a lot kinder to yourself. If you’ve started with a bad day, instead of dreading having to tackle all the goals you set for yourself the evening before, you can focus on easing yourself back into the swing of things.
Going with the flow can sound scary, but once you take the plunge, you won’t regret it. Every two hours, write down a set of tasks that you want to complete in the next two hours. Be reasonable — you won’t accomplish a whole bucket list in a couple of hours, after all — but give yourself enough to be occupied, with time for breaks.
Don’t worry if for the first few days you don’t achieve what you’d like. After a while, you’ll start to loosen the iron-fisted grip on your day and embrace the adaptability that comes with the gift to go with the flow. There may be some days when you might need to temporarily take more control once again; this style of planning is not deadline friendly. But with the right balance, you can wave goodbye to the disappointment of an incomplete task list, and take one step closer to the frame of mind we all want to be in — peace.
