How many planners do you own? Me, I own two official planners right now. And the one that I actually use—well, it’s just a big turquoise notebook. You see, my struggle with planning and scheduling has a long history.

I’ve gotten pieces of it right—I currently am pretty freaking spectacular at entering anything for which I need a reminder into my Google calendar.

Ukelele for the kid’s music class? Check.

Dog’s vet appointment? Check.

Driving for a field trip? Check.

Pay the bills? Check.

I’ve gotten really good at scheduling. Pop it in the calendar, set a reminder, and I don’t have to think about it again.

But scheduling is different than planning.

Click here to read the related blog post Planning vs. Scheduling: Why You Have It All Wrong

In the past several years, I’ve been on a journey to get better at planning. Because I can’t schedule the really important stuff until I’ve actually planned it.

And I can’t actually plan it until I’m really aware of what I’m doing and what I want.

But let me back up. Let me tell you a little about my history with planning.

I Love Me A New Planner.

Photo via Flickr

I get kind of giddy when I step into a Hallmark store. The empty pages of beautiful journals just beckon to me. I see the planners promising balanced bliss, and I melt a little bit. I envision writing on the beautiful pages and instantly becoming a peaceful, organized woman. I buy it.

Maybe I write in it once or twice. And this is what happens:

I hate the way my terrible handwriting mars the pages.
I fill it up with so many to-dos and ideas and plans that I never get to them all.
I don’t open it up the next day because all of the to-dos I wrote are overwhelming and I know I won’t get to them all.
I say fuck it. I know I’m only going to get to one to-do anyway, so what’s the point of writing it down in a planner? I can keep track of one thing in my head. I’m not that

To-Dos Take Over Your Planner

So last year, I decided to get a little more soulful about the whole planning process. I had gotten really good at some aspects of planning:

I started doing more vision work.
I started practicing gratitude.
I started scheduling many of my to-dos automatically to get them off my plate so they wouldn’t interfere with my soul work.
I started to add play into my life vision.

But I was still struggling with planning, especially when it came to the big picture stuff. I was getting better at the little daily routines, but I was getting caught up in them.

Why?

Because I was putting them in my planner.

In an effort to be efficient, I didn’t want to double up. I wanted ONE PLANNER that would be the place where I planned my big goals as well as tiny appointments.

You know what happened? My tiny to-dos took over my life, and I found it hard to focus on the big picture.

So I Bought A Vision-Oriented Planner

So I bought a new planner. This one was called the Passion Planner. {Yep, that’s it in the photo. Big, gross stain on it and everything.}

Every month, week and day, you spend time brainstorming your vision so that you can pull together all the tasks, plans and projects for that time frame and relate them back to your vision or goals.

I loved the idea of taking time to do this every week, but two things happened:

I got overwhelmed when trying to tie the vision work into concrete goals and then mar the planner with my ugly handwriting and what felt like permanent goals.
I still felt like sitting and doing this planning work was a waste of time. If I had an hour to kill, couldn’t I just hit up my to-dos instead of sitting there planning them?

So I stopped writing in the planner. I had all my goals mapped out for a one-year plan and a 5-year plan, but actually scheduling them in my planner was overwhelming to me. And I still didn’t feel like I had time for it.

Listen… I’m going to make a long story shorter here and tell you that during the interim, I actually bought a whole OTHER planner too. It was centered around ritual, which I really was working on developing. I still haven’t opened it. (Good thing I buy planners without pre-printed dates).

I Was Losing The Planning Game.

Photo via Flickr

I felt like a failure. I couldn’t get my shit together because I could keep a damn planner. Everyone else talked about the importance of planning for feeling like you have peace and balance in your life, and I was all like, “I can’t. It just doesn’t work for me.”

I gave up.

And then I realized why I was losing the planning game.

You can set goals, you can decide what tasks you’re going to do on a certain day, you can plan for the future all you want. But if you don’t take a good, hard look at what you’re doing right now, all of your best intentions to plan will go right out the window.

It’s kind of like meal planning without taking stock of what’s in your fridge and pantry already. Sure, you can go through Pinterest and find your recipes for the week. You can decide what you’re going to make and when. You plan it, you schedule it.

But if you don’t look at what you already have in front of you, the rest of the process will seem overwhelming. You either have to purchase ALL of your ingredients at the grocery store, because you never checked to see if you actually had eggs, Worcestershire sauce and basil in your fridge.

You end up spending a lot more money than you need to.

You end up spending a lot more time than you need to.

And then the whole process is overwhelming and you decide you just can’t do this every week.

Planning Without Awareness Is Like Starting From Scratch Over And Over Again.

And that’s exhausting.

If you take stock of what’s already in your life, you can move forward to grab hold of what’s not in a more peaceful, prepared way.

If you spend that extra time to create awareness, you’ll be able to plan for what you already know instead of grasping frantically at big future ideas that have no basis in reality.

When you’re fully aware of your reality, there are fewer unknowns. Life is less scary.

I’m publishing a blog post about How To Beat Anxiety With Awareness later this week. Stay tuned.

When you cultivate awareness, you begin to feel grounded, balanced, and confident. And that’s when you can plan to take on the world, mama.

Do You Struggle With Planning And Scheduling?

I have a little gift that will help you look a little closer at the now instead of focusing on the later.

It’s totally free, totally for you, and it’s going to help you get in the habit of being more mindful with what’s going on in your life so that you can plan better for the future.

Start your path out of the overwhelm. Plan to stop surviving and start living.

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(You’ll be asked to enter your email address, and then you’ll be given INSTANT ACCESS to the free gift, which is a PDF that you can download and print off 4-evah.)