Welcome to another article in the lifestyle department. It's so good to see everyone learn and grow into their life. From a very early age, many of us are taught to plan ahead of time. The more you plan, the better your trip/event will be. Some people even suggest figuring out the tiny details in a plan to avoid surprises. This advice works on things like weddings/parties, but it doesn't necessarily work on things like taking a vacation or in a zoomed-in version of life, and I'm going to explain why. Let's go to our hypothetical chat table.
Am I Over-planning?
I really took my time and thought about this before presenting it to you. I have experienced this in life and wanted to share it with my friends and family.
Over-planning is closely related to overthinking, and let me explain this to you with an example.
So, very recently, I took a trip to California with a group of girls. One of them was my friend, but the other two were brand new people. This trip was about twelve days long (the longest domestic trip of my life), and it was my first time visiting northern California. Almost two weeks before the trip, we had a rough itinerary of what we would do during this time. Half of it was based on weather, and the other half was based on work schedules. We would wake up and plan the day in terms of what spots we would hit for the day. One of the girls from the group tried to plan the locations we would eat and places we could take bathroom breaks. This was a little too much for me. When you visit a new place, you want to leave some details to figure out as you go. Because if you don't get the expected results, you end up disappointed. Over-planning also creates useless stress, and you end up forgetting the entire goal (in this case, the goal of the trip), which was to enjoy life.
Is Over-planning Leading To Unfinished Projects?
Here's another side of things. Children are so carefree. They have a lot of dreams and goals. They don't worry about the little technical things. They view dreams as a vision. Which I call a "zoomed-out version of the life." We get so caught up in these minor technicalities that we forget about the vision when we grow up. Even companies buy ideas and dreams, especially in the Computer Science field. During our interviews, they want us to know the basics and how we think. They believe that everyone can be trained on technical skills, which is true.
A lot of times, over-planning kills our dreams. We start questioning many things that are remotely close to our project. Why? Because we are over-planning, aka overthinking. We might abandon that project right there if we think of something that might be a little challenging to deal with.
Dreams have a magical vibe✨ to them. When we get too zoomed-in on our dream, we care more about the results than the dream. The magic starts fading away, and we question ourselves, "why am I even doing this?". This is a big red flag. Immediately try to zoom out and look at the bigger picture. Remember, some days are hard, but it's part of life.
Solution?
So, what's the fix to this?
Everyone should plan fundamental things ahead of time and then have a strategy. Focus more on the solutions than the problems. This approach is called the "solution-oriented" approach. So many people are stuck on past mistakes and what they did or didn't do. Mate, you can't do anything about what happened in the past, so forget about it and focus on your future strategy. I used to be in this boat where I needed every second of my day planned. I didn't realize how unhappy it was leaving me when my day didn't go as planned. I called my past approach "micro-managing my day." I wanted to manage each minute of my day, which is crazy to think. If you have had a micro-managing manager, you exactly know how it feels.
Especially ladies, we tend to overthink and over-plan a lot of things. While this may work at times, mostly, it's just harming us. Put the intention out there and trust the universe to do its magic. You will notice how your stress levels fall, and you will enjoy life at a different level.
If you guys have a contradicting argument, please comment so I can learn too! Otherwise, don't forget to heart it 😉
Comments