How to make plans when everything keeps changing

One week ago today, it was my birthday. And I planned a most amazing day off - I went to workout at my favorite barre studio, I had a tasty lunch, I spent a fair bit of time strategizing and big dreaming about Thrive PhD in Quarter 2 of 2020, I went to go see a show downtown. At dinner, my husband and I discussed the news and wondered aloud if things would start changing.

Readers, they did.

I’ve made six news plans in the seven days since, and all of them have been smart, and well considered, I’ve had to scrap them all.

All in all, we’re very lucky - I have the space and privilege to take a breath and try and figure out what comes next. But I am still more distracted, more anxious, more bananas than I can remember being in a long time. And from what I’m hearing from friends, colleagues, and clients - that’s all of us. So here are a few things that are really helping me to make some plans and find some structure even as things change by the hour:

1. I am abandoning the idea that I’ll be able to plan effectively more than a few days at a time. Now is not the time to embark on my quarterly planning tasks! It is not even really the time to set up big monthly goals, at least not specific ones. I’m planning my days and my weeks so that I have some structure to my time, but I’m letting go of the idea of planning as a way to maximize achievement for right now. It’s planning for structure and sanity.

2. I made a list of all my open projects and put them into three categories:
   
   I need to work on this to keep it active
   I’d like to work on this
   I am okay with pausing this
   
   This is letting me see a little more clearly where my time and focus (when I’ve got it) should go. I’m also committing to revisiting this list often as the situation changes - as my resources change, this list might change too.

3. As I sit down and plan my week and my day, the time goes first to the “I need to work on this” stuff. I also am scheduling in NON-NEGOTIABLE breaks and self care. Just because I am home all the time does NOT mean that it is healthy for me to work all the time. If I have time left over (ie, I’ve gone through and put in all my appointments and scheduled work sessions) I am leaving it blank right now. In other seasons of my life, I would have scheduled other activities, but for now, I want the flexibility that those “buffers” afford me.

4. I am, for the sake of my brain, treating this as a “new normal” as opposed to a time limited scenario. For the first few days, I was spending A LOT of time and energy trying to figure out how long these conditions could last or when I could put in a “back to normal” date in my calendar, and it was really wearing me out. The date kept shifting, and my anxiety kept growing, and I kept trying to read more news to get more data for planning, and it was not a good cycle. So I just decided to make my plans with these constraints until further notice.

5. I’m also being really honest about what my emotional and physical restraints are. I am not functioning at 100% output right now. I don’t know of many who are. So this is not the time for me to say “in a good week, I can do 20ish hours of focused writing.” Halve it, and start from there. Maybe quarter it. Set reasonable goals, and adjust if you have to. Setting unreasonable goals and then not meeting them will only make you feel worse.

6. “Welcome back” is the mantra I use in my Thrive PhD community and I’ve been sharing it around a lot lately. If I step away from my work, if I’m unexpectedly away from my desk, if it suddenly becomes necessary for me to take a day and just be numb for a while, I say to myself “welcome back.” Not “how will you make up for that break?”, not “was it worth it?”, and not “did you deserve or really need that time away?”. It’s just “welcome back”: welcome back to your work, welcome back to your desk, welcome back to your communities, welcome back and let’s try again. We will all need breaks. We will all have things come up that we couldn’t have seen coming. The best thing we can do is welcome ourselves back, when we’re ready.

7. All we can do is make the best decisions we can with the data we have at the time, and then adjust. The data is changing. The situations are changing. All we can do is try to make smart decisions, and adapt.

   These are strange times. I honestly do not know what will happen - all I know is that if we treat this like a fun, indefinite work retreat, and then beat ourselves up for not writing the next great novel, or not getting extra research papers written up, or not perfectly homeschooling our kids while we try and teach remotely, we’ll have missed the point. The point is not to use the changes in the way we structure our lives to work more, the point is to be aware of the fact that this situation is bigger than our deadlines, and all we can do is try our best to keep surfing the waves as they come.