On Planning

The gorgeous, talented and downright lovely Bloglily tagged me (and other bloggers) to talk about planning, and maybe even produce an example of my organizational skills. Well, bloggers, I think we’re friendly enough for me to make a confession to you. I used to be an obsessive-compulsive planner. Yes, indeed, years of my life have passed in frenzied logistical analysis and what you see before you is a reformed creature, a recovering planoholic. There was a time when I had plans to hierarchise my plans, when I had barely prised my eyes open in the morning before I was arranging and re-arranging the day’s events in my head. At this particular point in my life I had a fairly complex career to keep running that included 12 hours of supervision a week, 80 tutorial students to look after, two committees to attend, a translation class to give as well as a series of lectures to deliver that came at different times and could not be reorganized. On top of that I would have any number of publications pending at various stages down the production line (and you would not believe the layers of complexity that go into the publication of the simplest article). Then there was a small child to cater for (with childminding or after school clubs to take into account) as well as a household to run.

It’s little wonder that my mind was on permanent overdrive, trying to keep on top of this mountain of tasks, obligations and chores. However, there were other, influential factors at work in the planning madness. It didn’t help that the male members of the household had practically set up the Headquarters of The Society for the Campaign Against Anticipation, so gloriously did they live in the moment. Every day I felt like Sisyphus, pushing his vast rock to the top of the mountain, only in my case it wasn’t a rock, it was a large and luxurious sleigh, in which my husband and son sat, watching the landscape unfold, waving regally at passers-by, wide-eyed and trusting, happy-go-lucky passengers on the journey of life. At some point, the exact moment escapes me now, I realized how disproportionate things had become, and I remembered that I was the one who had chronic fatigue. Well, go figure.

Of course there’s nothing like being so ill you can’t do anything to redress the balance of power. But once I began to recover, I did not take back all the responsibilities I used to have. I felt that all that planning had only been fifty percent useful; the other half of the motivation had been about whipping myself towards ever higher levels of achievement, ever greater feats of perfection, and there’s no way that’s healthy. My husband and son responded very well to taking on their part in the running of the household, although the changeover has not been without some disadvantages. My husband turns out to be a real nag when he wants something done, and give my son a list and he transforms into Mussolini. My rule was far more benign. Furthermore, like all radical changes, I have a suspicion that I’ve gone too far in the other direction now, and my embrace of spontaneity is perhaps a little excessive. But I do have a few basic rules of planning that I still apply to events and generally I have a little think at the start of each week, and at the start of each day to see what needs to be done.

I think the kind of events that require planning split into two categories: there’s the short term, day to day kind of tasks that need to be repeated regularly but can easily be postponed if necessary; and then there’s the longer term sort of task that can vary from projects at work to family birthdays. The work for these is spread over a longer period of time, but they tend to have absolute deadlines for accomplishment. Each planning review I make, and I tend now just to do them mentally, considers these events against the three goals of the day. The first goal is survival. So this generally means, do we have food to eat, clothes to wear, bills to pay and a son prepared for school? The second goal is some rudimentary peace of mind, and that means, have I done some work towards the ongoing academic projects, have I any birthdays or appointments, is the house clean enough that I could face the unexpected arrival of the neighbours without (deep) shame? And the third goal is pleasure. This is probably the only one I make any real effort towards planning these days. Several of the events in the other categories also fall into this one, as in: do we have a nice meal to look forward to at the end of the day? Do I have some fun work in prospect to offset the obligatory chores? But I’ll also try to set aside downtime, for reading and resting and being with the family. All of this doesn’t mean to say that I don’t find my mind racing with plans, but nowadays what I mostly find whizzing about my brain are half-finished lines of the blog post that’s next on the agenda. The planning obsessed parts of the brain don’t die, I find, they just swap topics.