Recently, I completed my Quarterly Review and Planning Session for the 2nd quarter of 2023. I typically go to an off-site location and spend a night, so I can focus.
As a part of this process, I review how I did the past quarter. I ask myself, What are my wins? This gives me a chance to recognize where I did well and celebrate my wins.
Next, I ask, What are my lessons learned? This prompts me to think about what mistakes or missteps I may have taken during the last quarter.
My Screwup — Trying to Launch Two Major Projects in the Same Quarter
It didn’t take me long to identify one big mistake I made in my planning for the last quarter — I planned to do too much.
At the beginning of the quarter, I determined that I was going to start two big projects:
- Commit to writing two blog posts a week instead of just one.
- I also decided that I was going to start working on a new Kindle book that would be based on a year’s worth of blog posts in another subject area.
I soon found that I was being unrealistic and had planned too much work for myself.
When I set aside time to work on the Kindle book, I found that I had very little motivation to do so, and would procrastinate getting started. This happened several times.
I finally realized what was going on was that my real priority was to produce two blog posts a week, and that is what I was focusing on. It took more time than I estimated it would take to write and edit the additional post. I didn’t have enough time to publish two posts and also do meaningful work on the Kindle book.
About halfway through the quarter, I decided I would set aside the Kindle project for the rest of the quarter, and just focus on getting the two blog posts done and published.
I also decided that I would rethink the Kindle book project at my next quarterly review.
My Lesson Learned — Don’t Plan to Launch More Than One Major Project in a Quarter
Recognizing how I screwed up by planning to do too much in one quarter led me to the lesson to be learned.
The lesson learned for me is that I shouldn’t launch two major projects in the same quarter. In this case, I tried to add an extra blog post each week, and at the same time start working on a major book project. Dumb!
My lesson learned — “Plan only one major project at a time.”
Why Our Present Selves Are Jerks and Overcommit Our Future Selves
You’d think that when I made this plan, I would have thought more carefully about the realities of time and effort before I committed to two major projects in the same quarter.
We all tend to overcommit our future selves with work. There are several reasons why:
1. “Affective Forecasting” leads us to give our future selves too much work because we underestimate “how much our emotional and physical states will affect our future decisions and ability to do the things we want to do.” Jory MacKay, Why You Keep Giving “Future You” Too Much Work.
Example: On Sunday, we think to ourselves that it would be really fun for our future self to go out to a concert on Friday night, so we put it on the calendar. However, by the time our future self gets home on Friday afternoon after a long week at work and fighting the commuter traffic, future self is exhausted.
Future self has no energy and absolutely no desire to drive in traffic downtown, look for a parking spot, and walk in the rain to a concert that’s not going to end for hours. Instead of going, he stays home, makes popcorn, and watches Netflix.
When we made our plans on Sunday, feeling well-rested and energetic, we underestimated how exhausted we’d be on Friday night.
2. “Present bias” “describes people’s tendency to opt for a smaller, immediate reward rather than waiting for a bigger reward in the future.” Becky Kane, Present Bias: Why You Don’t Give a Damn About Your Future Self.
Scientific studies have demonstrated that when our present selves think about our future selves, we don’t really consider them to be us, but someone else.
When we opt to give our future selves more work, we get to skip it now, and “We get to enjoy the very concrete, immediate benefits of our actions while “someone else” (our Future Selves) suffer the hypothetical, future consequences.”
3. We assume the future me can do much more than the present me. It’s not logical or reasonable to assume so, but we do it anyway. Perhaps it’s a rationalization that justifies our implementing present bias?
How Can We Stop Being Jerks to Our Future Selves?
• Plan for shorter periods of time. When we make plans for an entire year or even 6 months, it’s easy to overestimate how much we can get done. “I’ve got almost unlimited time, a whole year, to get that done. No problem!”
I’ve found it helps me to make almost all of my plans for only one quarter at a time, not an entire year. 12 weeks sounds like (and is) a lot less time than 52 weeks. By restricting my plans to 12-week periods, I’m usually more realistic about what I might be able to accomplish during that limited period.
I know, you’re saying, “But that didn’t keep you from screwing up last quarter!” You’re right. This is not a guarantee you’ll be more realistic in your planning, but it is an enormous help.
The key resource I recommend is a book, The 12 Week Year, by Brian P. Moran (Author), Michael Lennington. The authors help you to set up a quarterly review system that helps to keep you more realistic in your planning.
• Get some experience planning and then evaluating how your plan worked out. Did you underestimate or overestimate how much time a task takes you? Use this information to make adjustments in your future planning.
• Time tracking might help you to get more accurate at estimating how long tasks take. You can keep a handwritten record of how much time you spend on what tasks each day, or use a digital time recorder like Timery. With some setup, a digital timer will record how much time you spend on activities and give you a weekly report summarizing the results.
• Time blocking can help us get more realistic about how much time we have. When we plan our time by creating blocks on a calendar for working on specific tasks, we can graphically see how limited our actual work time is. This can help us to be more realistic about assigning ourselves additional tasks.
Feeling Like a Failure When I Overcommit Myself
When I realized mid-quarter that I was not going to be able to work on my Kindle book and decided to stop the project for now, I felt like a failure. Why couldn’t I get both of my projects done? Was I an undisciplined, lazy, and unproductive person? All the negative story tracks started playing at a loud volume.
It’s a fact that we always give more attention to, and remember, our failures more than our wins. I wasn’t going to let the fact that I successfully doubled the number of posts I published that quarter get in the way of feeling like a failure!
I attended the Air Force Survival School course when I was on active duty. Part of the program was resistance training, or how to stay alive in captivity and return with honor.
During the training, I failed many times. I stupidly made awful, disgusting anti-American propaganda that could be used against my country. I felt awful. But later I learned the psychologists who had designed the training specifically set it up for students to fail. They wanted us to remember and learn from our experiences, and they knew we remember our failures better than anything else.
I’m inclined to beat myself up after a perceived failure. To move beyond that, I had to realize that what had really happened was that I set myself up for failure by foolishly assigning myself two major projects in the same quarter.
It wasn’t about “I’m a lazy, unproductive failure.” Rather, it was a mistake in assigning my future self too much. Instead of feeling bad about myself, I needed to learn a lesson about assigning myself too much work. I need to resolve not to allow that to happen again in the future (which it probably will given our tendency to overestimate how much work our future selves can do.) Instead of beating myself up, I turned it into “a learning experience.”
The proper response to making a mistake is to treat yourself with kindness and graciousness, say “Oh well,” and start again. Soundtracks, by Jon Acuff.
Conclusion
I’ve covered a lot in this post. I reflected on my previous quarter’s planning and realized I had made the mistake of trying to launch two major projects at once. This led to procrastination and ultimately abandoning one project midway through the quarter.
As a result, I learned the lesson that in the future I should only plan one major project at a time and be more realistic about time and effort. I also discussed why we tend to overcommit our future selves with work, and provided tips on how to avoid this and be kinder to ourselves when we make mistakes.
What about your planning? Are you also sometimes a jerk by overcommitting your future self? Do you also set yourself up for failure?
If so, I encourage you to learn from my mistakes. Perhaps you can avoid making the same mistakes I did. And even if you do make the same mistakes, treat yourself with kindness and gentleness.