What covid taught me about overplanning..

I am obsessed about making plans and structures and goals and whatnot. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration if I said I have an excel sheet called my life goals where I have laid out my short term, mid term and long term plan and then broken them down by specific activities by month. And it doesn’t stop there. I even diligently track and monitor it weekly to see how am I faring with respect to those goals and plans.

It helps me immensely to stay focused and on track. But often time I have had people telling me that maybe I am overplanning, maybe I am obsessive about goals and milestones and not living life each day. Life is unpredictable and the beauty of life is in living each moment and taking risks rather than having everything laid out. I would brush this off confidently citing way too many situations and examples where planning has helped me. Yes I was over confident but somewhere I was scared not to have a plan for something.

But then covid happened. I still remember sitting in my hotel room during my annual vacation on the night of 31st December 2020 and making my annual plan for the year. Yes, I diligently did that and followed through.. most of them.

Little did I know that the world is going to go through the worst pandemic ever and with that our lives are going to turn upside down. We will need to redefine our habits, our work and most importantly our lives..

For couple of months I lived in daze. I didn’t know what to do, how to approach this new reality and how to sail through this. And that led to anxiety and fear of not being in control, fear of helplessness. This fear and anxiety led to more languishing and before I realized I was in this circuitous hell of helplessness à anxiety à languishing à helplessness.

It took me a loads of willpower to come out of that slumber of depression and helplessness and make sense of this new situation.

And I decided to put my planning skill to use to create an “unplan”. Yes I call that an unplan because I gave myself a month to just go with the flow. Not plan anything. Anything. Just take each day as it comes and observe my feelings, emotions and activities. I didn’t expect myself to suddenly start loving ambiguity, suddenly change as a person but I started embracing a bit of ambiguity in life and being ok with that emotionally.

Doing this for a month, gave me the much needed energy and emotional balance to take small steps towards taking a planned approach towards few things in life while leaving few things to chance.

Right now, when I am writing this article, I have been able to get back on track with my habit of planning but I also consciously make an effort to weave in my new found love of living in the moment in between. This helps me to discover things by happenstance and grow as a person. At the same time, my planning keeps me closer to my goals and keep chasing my dreams!