Planning

Planning is a good way of staying ahead of time and the inevitable wrenches that life throws into well oiled machinery of any life. Living in reaction to what life throws at you while speeding down its highway is a recipe for disaster. I can't help thinking that people texting while driving is a symptom of this mentality. In my own practice, planning is a daily activity in various situations and in various forms.

Planning life's practical decisions in advance with mindful and scientific calm requires the establishment of an ongoing mindful and scientific daily practice. The mindful piece is achieved through being well balanced in who you are in the here and now. This enables you to take in data from your environment without defensive or overly emotional response. The scientific piece is the conscious accumulation of that data from the environment to formulate a hypothetical plan of action. By keeping all planned action in the context of mutable experimentation, you are able to remain flexible and effectively responsive to changes in your environment or situations. 

The key to effective planning is timeliness. It is one thing to put off deciding on your wardrobe until an hour before you are leaving for work. It is another thing to put off planning about where you will be living in six months or a year if you change or lose your job. Keeping an ongoing list of projects, desires and long-term goals is helpful. It is the habit of planning out ahead of tomorrow that brings benefit. This process encourages dreaming and fantasizing in a positive way. It can open your creative process, rather than confining it. 

Modern information technology, by enabling routine contemporaneous decision-making while driving or picking a restaurant for dinner, impedes forming habits of long-term planning for those who have never been schooled in doing it, in my opinion. Driving behaviors again illustrate my point. Reliance on GPS devices has enabled people to drive without planning their routes. Dependence on the GPS device can be effective. However, having swerved to avoid a dozen drivers recently, who made erratic turns in response to their GPS commands, I do not feel the devices have contributed significantly to the general safety of the roads. I have also spoken with several people who have gotten seriously lost by following the directions of their GPS into areas they never studied before going there. My point is simply this: Using information technology to plan is very different from depending on information technology to compensate for disorganization or laziness. 

Effective planning requires self-discovery. If your life is your laboratory, you are the variable that must be first examined. Figuring out your baseline abilities, tolerances and needs is a necessary part of planning. Some of this discovery inevitably comes with time and ongoing experimentation. However, it is establishing the scientific approach to looking at your own behaviors and emotions which will be most helpful in planning your future actions. Relying on events and circumstances to shape your life may land you in a comfortable situation by chance, but that situation will feel tenuous as long as you don't feel you had a guiding hand in getting there.

Planning should be mitigated by realism. Any plan can be crushed by circumstance. Recent earthquakes illustrate this well. However, despite the crushing of the plan, the effective planner is much more likely to survive catastrophe, if given even odds. Learning to relinquish illusions of control of anything but yourself helps to make planning more realistic. The benefit of planning is ultimately the planning itself, rewarded by the occasional successes along the way.