I am begging you to plan your days
This was supposed to be a post where I prioritised the algorithm. Writing to gain views, but I saw a post that might change my mind: “If writing on Substack does not move you, you are doing it wrong.” So this post is not perfect. It will be a little all over the place. But I wanted to post something that felt real to me. The title might sound a little clickbaity, but I really am begging you to plan your day because it has been the most important change I have made to my life.
A little context about me and my planning journey. All of my adult life I have struggled with mental health, and when I got into therapy for the third time, we prioritised organising myself, combined with some other things. Let’s focus on the planning part. I don’t think that planning alone made my life better and made life easier. It is not a quick fix or a magic pill, but I believe it has been vital for me to be able to do all of the things I want to do. When I figured out that I had a mental health issue, I felt like my life was over. With that I mean that I’ve always been someone who has had a bunch of huge dreams, and seeing that I had a mental health issue made me think that I had to give up on them.
It wasn’t true, but I had to change the way I lived my life. I don’t know if that comes down to mental health or just growing up and having a lot more responsibilities that can feel difficult to manage, but I had to change something. I had to spend more time planning my days and organising my life.
The biggest thing that happened when I decided to organise my life and get into productivity (which means daily planning, journaling, and note-taking) was that I quickly got to know myself a lot better. I think that is something people need to spend more time doing: getting to know yourself. Because there is so much noise out there, at a certain point I had to ask myself: which of my beliefs, thoughts, and ideas were my own, and which ones were shaped by an algorithm? So when I say that I’m begging you to plan your days, what I’m actually saying is that I am begging you to shut out the noise and listen to yourself on a regular schedule. Whether that’s weekly, monthly, or daily doesn’t matter as much. I tend to do it monthly, weekly, seasonally, and yearly, but the point is that you need to shut down the noise and just listen to yourself for a moment.
What does shutting out the noise actually mean?
When I start my days or weeks without a plan, I often end up doing things that don’t help me achieve my goals, or things that I don’t actually like doing. I just do them because they are simple, nearby, and easy. I have also found that on the days when I don’t have a plan, I am much more susceptible to notifications. Every email, every message, every Teams notification makes me change my focus onto something new because I haven’t decided what I want to do. All of the notifications, all of the noise, can interrupt my focus, which in the end results in me spending the whole day working without feeling like I have achieved anything, and knowing that I haven’t achieved anything that brings me closer to my goals.
What I have also learned is that the noise isn’t getting any less as I grow older. It is actually the other way around. As I grow older, there are more expectations, more questions, and more notifications. If you allow the noise to decide what you are going to do, you can end up never doing the things you want.
Not only that, but as I have grown older, I have learned that fun things need to be scheduled so that they are prioritised. I have learned that whenever I don’t schedule the things that are really fun, they quickly get taken away from me. Because there is so much to do, and you will never be able to do everything, you just have to try to prioritise, and the way I do it is by adding it into my calendar. It is so easy to think that the fun stuff isn’t important, so when you haven’t prioritised or scheduled it, it can be the first thing you push away when life gets hectic. I have learned that I am less likely to deprioritise my fun stuff when I have it scheduled, but if I do not have it scheduled, it is really easy to deprioritise. That is one of the reasons why I recommend scheduling the fun stuff as well, not only your work tasks but also the things that you find really fun and want to do. I try to schedule at least one big fun highlight every single week. That can be working on a personal project, like creating journal covers with leather. It can be watching a movie I’ve been looking forward to. It can even be watching sports, which I always schedule because I think it is really important to have non-negotiable fun stuff in your day.
But blocking out the noise isn’t just about doing the things you want. It is also about figuring out what you actually need to do, which sounds really easy but is very difficult when there is so much happening all the time. I can sit at home and read a book, watch a movie, watch a YouTube video, or read an article, and someone will send me a message about something I have to do. I need to figure out if this is something I have time for, if this is something I should do, or if it is something I want to do. We live in a time where we are accessible all the time, which means we are available for other people’s input all the time. Which again means that it is so important to figure out a way to decide what you can, want, and should do every single day.
So I am begging you to plan your days, not because planning in itself will solve every problem, not because planning has solved every single one of my problems, and not even because planning can help you get things done and be more productive. I am begging you to plan because so many things are fighting for your attention all the time, and you can either allow them to steal your time, or you can use planning to take control of your life.
Conclusion
This post is all over the place, and I will come back and write a more practical and better-written post about this subject. Currently I had so many emotions and feelings about this subject because of some of the content I’ve recently watched and some of the discussions I’ve read. I needed to get it all out as a really emotional person, so it might not be my best post. It is probably my most authentic post because it is just my raw thoughts out there. As I said, I will come back with a more in-depth post where I also talk more practically about how I choose to plan my days, to help give you some inspiration for how you could plan yours.