Browsing through productivity posts in Hacker News and productivity subreddits, it seems like planning has become a hobby for many people. Admittedly, this has also been a thing for me. I love conceptualizing grand plans for myself. I love reading strategies on the most efficient ways to achieve some goal. I love learning for others how they plan. I love designing dashboards to track my objectives.
For instance, I am pushing myself to write 300 words per day on two books that I wish to have finished. I’ve created a tracker on Excel. I track the number of words I write per day:
By tracking this, I can do some data analysis. I can track what is my actual rate of writing. I can track how many days will I finish given the projected number of words the books will have (my current estimate for the two is around 109,500). Finally, if I slack, how many words do I need to write for the current day to catch up.
The problem with me in general though is that planning has become a hobby to the point that sometimes I spend more time designing these trackers, instead of actually doing the actual work. Planning has been my way of procrastinating, of convincing myself that I am doing actual work instead of distracting myself.
I don’t really know how to end this post. But, I’m writing just to reflect on my tendency to fall into these habits.