Believe it or not, teaching academics how to plan their work is a big part of the training programmes I’ve been running over the past several months.
There’s the importance of breaking a big project like writing a grant proposal into smaller steps and then using backwards planning to assign deadlines to each small task so that everything gets done in a timely fashion.
There’s the necessity of going beyond a to-do list—what you need to do—to when you’re going to it. According to professional organiser Julie Morgenstern: “A to-do list that isn’t connected to a ‘when’ rarely gets done. So don’t have a separate to-do list from your calendar. Schedule what needs to get done and when.”
And there’s all the quotes about planning. (As an aside, I love to use quotes in my teaching because someone else has probably said what I’m trying to get across in a more concise way.)
- Alan Lakein: “Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.”
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “A goal without a plan is just a wish.”
- Benjamin Franklin: “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”
- Dwight D. Eisenhower: “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”
- Edwin Louis Cole: “There are dreamers and there are planners; the planners make their dreams come true. “
- Eleanor Roosevelt: “It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan.”
- And so on (I have dozens).
The reason I focus on planning is because it is one thing that is often in our control to do something about. It can help us flip from the state of being reactive and feeling stressed to being proactive and feeling more in charge of our life. In the case of my students, if researchers can use planning to avoid procrastination, perfectionism, and last-minute panic, they are more likely to complete high-quality work.
There are a few quotes I don’t use share on my slides though: Robert Burns’ “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry” and the Yiddish saying, “Man plans and God laughs”.
However, they were on my mind earlier this week as our birthdaversary plans ended up going through A, B, C and C(2).
Plan A seemed straightforward: drive to the town of Frome (rhymes with broom) for an excellent breakfast at their River House Café, pootle about the local shops, then pay a visit to the nearby village of Mells for an afternoon walk in a beautiful setting. Simple but satisfying.
Then Storm Bert popped up on the radar. This winter storm was forecast to bring a lot of wind and rain over the weekend, and we assumed that there might be some flooding that would make the journey to Somerset a bit of a hassle. We set Plan A to the side for the time being.
Plan B came into the world on Sunday morning. We booked train tickets to London for Monday, with the idea of visiting two exhibitions we had our eye on at the British Library (this one and this one), followed by a pootle around Coal Drops Yard. Cultural highlights and another area with high pootle potential – what’s not to like?
We woke up on the birthdaversary day itself to discover that trains were cancelled due to flooding on the railway line. Bert had foiled us yet again.
Time to enact Plan C: Chippenham town centre.
It’s at this point that I should probably mention that we don’t watch or listen to local news. So we were a little surprised to see police tape and a lot of emergency vehicles blocking the high street. We parked the car and walked down towards the river …
… only to discover that the River Avon had burst its banks and flooded the Chippenham High Street and Monkton Park.
It was a beautiful morning—blue skies, sun, and a comfortable temperature for the end of November—but the flooding meant we weren’t going any further. Plan C scuppered.
So we headed home and settled into Plan C(2): the couch. We watched the Netflix documentary about consumerism: Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy. Not exactly cheery, but certainly thought-provoking and well worth your time. If you want to get me a birthday or Christmas present, watch this instead (or check out the More Thought, Less Waste gift guide).
I am sharing this post on what is Thanksgiving in the United States, and I would like to give thanks for a lot of things.
MrElaineous and I are safe, and our family and friends are safe.
Our house is fine and watertight, more or less.
I have friends and family who reached out to wish me a happy birthday from around the globe (seriously, one is on her way to Antarctica at the moment). In addition to the constant advertisements that we’re surrounded by (see above re: Buy Now!), we live in a world where more and more is bidding for our attention every day. Remembering to contact a friend on their birthday can easily get lost in the usual hustle and bustle, so I am grateful for this demonstration of affection.
Meanwhile, my heart goes out to all of the people and businesses affected by the floods, here in Chippenham and across the UK. Storm Bert is just one of my many natural disasters to have hit the planet this year, and it is likely just the tip of a rapidly melting iceberg when it comes to climate change.
Yet, when nothing goes according to plan, we have just one question to consider: how can we make things better?
On that note, I think it’s best to wrap up a week—and a month—that has seen plans go out the window with a quote borrowed from Barack Obama:
“The best way to not feel hopeless is to get up and do something. Don’t wait for good things to happen to you. If you go out and make some good things happen, you will fill the world with hope, you will fill yourself with hope.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
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Really like the quote from Barack Obama as it is so true. It reminds me of another good bit of advice which resonates for me: What one doable thing can you do right now to change something about you / your situation / how you feel / etc.
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Thanks, Sean! It really is about finding the one thing that is in your control to tackle and taking the necessary steps towards accomplishing it.