A Plan Is As Good As How Easy It Is To Stick To It
My original “plan” to write a blog post every day in 2024 is proving harder than I thought. I expected to have a lot of material to work with on the launch of The Vault and what I’m affectionately/irritatingly calling the McFiction Project.
Both of which are still in development and now an absolute priority. Because while I figured that I’d be able to get them both up and running immediately, that’s taking longer than expected, and among the issues with that are that I’m in a constant state of squandering valuable time and energy on figuring out what to do with the blog.
Here’s the issue.
An Idea Is Not A Plan
If, like me, you’re taken by interesting ideas, then you have ideas that are in various stages of becoming a plan.
For instance, I’m listening right now to a soundscape I created because of some project that I figured I could quickly bring into the world. I don’t think I’ve written about it on the blog yet, but it’s one of those things that is actually pretty quick to create, and based on years of learning, playing around and so on.
The problem is that an idea isn’t a plan. It’s a dream and another thing on a to-do list.
Case in point, 366 stories in 366 days for this year. I’m very behind on that one. It’s a good idea, and I would say I still plan to complete it on time, however, that’s the point; it’s not a plan. It’s a commitment and the light at the end of a tunnel I’m progressing very slowly on.
And honestly, as big a problem as not getting closer to the end goal is, the real issue you have with ideas is that they masquerade as a source of energy but in reality, they’re a drain.
This project needs to be done, so you can’t concentrate on the next one.
Nightmare.
Here’s the solution I came up with yesterday, which works for me and might work for you. In a way, it’s a throwback to the old blog bits and one particular post that comes to mind where I wrote that nobody pays you for ideas.
Even when they do.
An Exercise: You Are Your Boss And Your Worst Employee
Back when I was a copywriting hustler, I would say yes to every job. I would do every job before the deadline, and in a way, for somebody who was their own boss, I was a model employee.
Now, when I have the passive income bits, savings accounts and all of my projects are basically my own, (in addition to the cyborg robot AI licensing bits, no less,) I’m less than ideal.
So yesterday, I sat and performed an exercise.
Imagine you were hired by a hypothetical, mystical boss who just happened to want to pay you to do exactly what it is you should be doing right now. How would you behave differently?
Now, obviously because I overcomplicate everything, I started off by thinking, “Well, I could literally create a company and pay myself a wage for the tasks done and…”
Then I stopped myself because I’d ruined the exercise.
After correcting my course, I said that I’d say yes to every job, forget having time off or relaxation or whatever, and then come up with efficient systems for getting things done. The important ingredient here is to remember two things:
- The boss sets a deadline. They do not care if you don’t make it. You’re fired if you don’t. You only get to say at the start, “I can do it by X.” After that, it’s out of your hands.
- The boss doesn’t care how you hit the deadline, only that you do. You only get to say, “Yes I can do this project” or “No, I can’t do this project” at the start. After that, it’s up to you.
Simple Exercise, Decision Elimination
I’ve written a lot recently about decision fatigue. This is a good example of how to practically combat that; you defer your creative and cognitive freedom to a metaphorical boss; it’s one less decision to make when you’re confronting what needs to be done.
You can expand on this exercise in numerous ways, but at its heart, you’re trying to increase output and happiness by decreasing the amount of decisions you make.
And also getting to the tasks at hand like you have to, because under this system, you do.
This is january 31 and I happened to be following a writing challenge (write one hour everyday) since jan 1st, and also the Ray Bradbury Reading challenge, both of which I’m struggling to keep.
But yesterday I published another piece on my substack, wrote for another one-hour (some sessions are being made into 30-45min), even after working and solving life stuff the whole day, having lots of things to deal besides these little projects, and then it struck me:
The amount of satisfaction I got from simply committing to something.
Yesterday I could have brushed it all off, the substack piece I would reschedule, the one-hour writing would be suppressed and I wouldn’t mind sleeping earlier. But because of the commitment I went to sleep a little bit later with a sense of deep satisfaction simply by the accomplished work that was not any boss’s issue but mine.
Working for myself, my stuff, my ideas. I even received some nice feedback from the substack piece, but even if no one had read that… the thing is still there, my writing is already done, and I can rest well knowing that I was my best employee of the day.