[AE.Personal] Even the best-laid plans still need to get laid.
Between NiNoBilMa, my budgeting project, my Lenten plans described yesterday in this space, and a smattering of other scattered things, it feels like the big theme of 2022 for me is the acquisition of skills that I either really should have taken up earlier and did not, or I allowed to languish and atrophy without noticing.
Like, I'm pretty sure it was earlier this year that I wrote about my fears that my ability to converse and generally communicate with people directly was atrophying. But even if it was the tail end of last year, this is the year I'm working on it.
Another one of the major ones which I'm finding out about is planning, of which I suppose budgeting is a subset. My first few months of experiences with NiNoBilMa and my various writing projects and other creative endeavors have been teaching me a lot about the difference between having an idea and having a plan.
It turns out that even a series of ideas about how and when a thing might be done aren't actually a plan, which is a shame, because ideas are easy and plans are... so far, for me... much more difficult.
This was a somewhat timely revelation for me, as it occurred at a time when I have been afflicted with pessimistic doubts connected to my regimen of ADHD medication, of the sort of "Are the meds still working? And if they work but I don't, does this mean that I've been the problem all along?"
Don't get me wrong... with the help of the medicine I have accomplished things that I would have never thought possible, and I have found many things that were difficult are far less daunting.
But I have found I still have a pronounced tendency to reach a certain point in a project or other undertaking where everything grinds to a halt or falls apart... that I am still better at starting things than keeping them going or finishing them.
There's an aphorism that takes many forms along the lines of "Failing to plan is planning to fail." It's been attributed to Benjamin Franklin and probably also Mark Twain, though it was almost certainly not said by either of them, as it's a very 20th century formulation.
But regardless of who said it first, it's a saying with legs, and it certainly applies here. My projects have been sputtering out on ADHD meds for the same reason they did before them: I haven't had plans for when the initial excitement and promise of the Big Ideas run out, or when something comes up, or when the assumptions regarding things like available time and energy run up against reality, or when life in general continues to happen, the way that it does.
Yesterday, in a series of tweets in conversation with yesterday's newsletter, I talked about how I'm consciously shifting my approach to tabletop game creation -- which I used to call "tabletop game design -- to explicitly recognize the difference between design and development:
https://twitter.com/AlexandraErin/status/1498361337042419712
My actual approach to game creation as it evolves is more like a recursively telescoping progression from Big Exciting Ideas to small, specific, workable ones, starting with an Internal Client who shows up and says, "I want something like this," and an Internal Designer who starts dreaming up things that are like this, and then an Internal Developer figures out how to make those things work together, and then perhaps an Internal Implementer to actually compile those things together... but I digress.
The reason I bring those tweets up is that I find elements of this approach can be generalized to anything that needs translating from a big idea to a workable plan and then concrete actions. There's not a 1:1 correlation where Design = Ideas and Development = Plan, but the principle holds: coming up with stuff that could be a thing is not the same thing as making stuff into a thing, and I find it fruitful to give myself space both for dreaming the big dreams or brainstorming solutions and then giving myself a separate, clearly delineated space to figure out how to make them work, if I can make them work.
So that's the general idea, which I'm working to adapt into plans for the things in my life that require them. If failing to plan is planning to fail, then planning to plan is planning to pl... actually, that sounds a lot like pointless busywork and treading water, doesn't it?
So let us say instead, only slightly less elliptically, that success in planning is planning for success.