Potts: Plan, but leave room for spontaneity

By Ken Potts

Pull out your daily planning calendar.

Notice anything? For example, how many entries are scratched out, written over or deleted? And how many things did you wind up doing that never got entered in your calendar — things for which you didn’t plan, things that just came up at the last minute?

Then there are all those “things to do” that didn’t get done. Are there times where a task gets entered on Monday, then again Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday just because you ran out of time to do everything you wanted or needed to?

Is there any unplanned time in your schedule? Or do you actually enter “appointments” for friends and family, for relaxation, for exercise, etc., just so you can try to fit everything in? (My planning calendar “allows” me to schedule appointments from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. seven days a week, gives me 27 lines to list things to do and another 11 lines for phone calls.)

If I remember my “management by objectives” courses in grad school, the better we plan, the more we accomplish in less time. That should translate into less stress and more time to just live. The problem for most people is that life seems to get in the way of planning.

I can schedule myself to the minute, come up with long- and short-term goals, and do all the other things I’m supposed to do — but inevitably something not in my schedule comes up.

Someone gets sick, I receive a “rush” work assignment, traffic is backed up, a computer crashes, a friend calls or drops by — life gets in the way.

I guess that’s the real problem — life. No matter how well we plan, a good part of life insists on being spontaneous. My week may look well-planned on Monday morning, but by Monday afternoon a good many of my plans are already changing.

So, do you just give up the idea of trying to plan anything, do you go with the flow — wait and see what happens? I had a friend once who lived that way. You’d ask him what he had planned for the day and he’d shrug his shoulders and say something like, “I’ll just see what happens.”

Of course, he had a tough time getting through college, holding down a job or doing anything else, and he drove the rest of us crazy. But at least he was never frustrated when his “plans” didn’t work out.

There is likely a middle ground here. Maybe we need to establish “possible” goals, make “tentative” plans and even set “probable” appointments. We also could let ourselves off the hook a bit when our ambitious scheduling, planning, etc., doesn’t work out. Sure, it’s nice to look at a “to-do” list with checks by each task, but life tends to be a bit sloppy at times.

Actually, the sloppy parts also can be the best parts. A phone call from an old friend, cuddle time with our kids, a canceled appointment that allows us to sit and enjoy the sunset — those things just can’t be scheduled. Yet they are a big part of what makes life worth living.

Now, excuse me while I check off “write newspaper column” on today’s list.