Stuck in the Planning stage? How to get from planning to doing.

I take great pride in my ability to make detailed plans for everything I set out to do. That’s who I am at heart, a planner. As soon as I get an idea or want to take up a project, I start planning. But, I often find myself stuck in planning without moving to execution. And, it causes me a great deal of frustration constantly.

I am pretty sure you are familiar with the feeling of seeing an idea that you have thought of, planned for, conceptualized, being executed by some one else. Makes you think why didn’t I just go ahead and did that? I have reflected a great deal on this trying to find a way out of getting stuck making plans. Then, one fine day, I picked up James Clear’s Atomic Habits that hit the nail on the head for me.

When I read about Motion and Action in this book, it really hit a nerve. Motion means strategizing for an action you wish to take. It is important to plan as you should first have a goal and a plan before you take Action. But Motion is useless without action.

I somewhat knew in my heart why I do what I do, but author’s articulate explanation in this book validated all those doubts. He explains why people like me get stuck in Motion phase or my dreaded planning cycle without ever taking action. It makes us feel we are making progress towards our goal, but we stop short of taking action to avoid the risk of failure. We do this to avoid criticism, being judged and failing. This fear is what keeps us in the endless loop of ideation and planning.

So how do we get out of this endless loop?

There are a lot of practical ideas put forth in this book that I have adopted myself and improvised with experience. These are a few that stuck with me and have helped-

1. Take tiny actions, baby steps, so to speak -“The Journey of a thousand miles began with a single step”. If you can’t get yourself to make big strides, start small until you can get into a habit and then move on to bigger things. Just a little bit of consistent progress every day makes for big gains over a period of time. When you take small actions every day, they become habits. Once they become your habits, it gets easier to do those things than not and that is when progress happens. Big gains are just small gains compounded over a longer period. If you strive to be 1 percent better every day, that’s 37X better over the course of a year. That beats no progress.
2. Rather than focusing on what you want to do, think of who you want to become – I have always enjoyed writing and have forever wanted to get into a habit of writing. So, rather than focusing on writing more often, I started to think of myself as a writer. I started telling my family and friends about how my dream is to be a writer. This is something that has helped me write more. I can’t be a writer if I don’t write, correct? I have found this to be a powerful habit developing tool. If you wish to start exercising, think of yourself as an athletic person who exercises. That will make it hard to not exercise.
3. Set a schedule – Make time for each activity. For instance, block an hour in the evening on your calendar for working out. Simply the act of blocking time for an activity makes it harder for us to make excuses to get out of it.
4. Plan for your top to-do items every day – If you feel your day being run over by mundane stuff and you constantly find yourself running out of time to do things you really want to do, then this might be an effective hack for you. Put your top 3 important tasks on a to-do list and do them first. I do this for work in the morning and for personal projects in the evenings and over the weekend. This helps me feel more productive and motivated as I get the most important thing out of the way first.
5. Hack the Habit Loop – Habit has 4 components. Take the habit of drinking your morning coffee. You wake up and get dressed – that’s your cue, you start craving your daily coffee as you drink it at this time every day. Drinking coffee is your response and the feeling you get from it is your reward. You can make use of these 4 components to develop any habit or even break out of the habits you want to get rid of. Let’s say, you want to get into the habit of reading at night. You should:
   1. Make your CUE obvious – Like a particular time of the day in a particular location or after a particular activity, let’s say once you are in bed at night. The time and location are powerful drivers of habit. For instance, when you wake up and go to the bathroom sink, you automatically start brushing because you are used to doing that every “Morning” “in your bathroom” so that is your cue.
   2. Make your CRAVING attractive – Think of yourself as a person who reads if you wish to develop a reading habit. Try to visualize yourself as a reader. This will make for a craving for you to start reading.
   3. Make the response easy – Keep a great book by your bedside with a nice light, maybe play some light music that can help you focus on the book. Free yourself of other distractions.
   4. Make the reward Sweet – You can choose to reward yourself after you finish a book. Treat yourself to something you like to reinforce the habit.
6. Habit Stacking – Another powerful tool that you can make use of is linking an established habit to a new one that you wish to develop. If you wish to start a running routine every morning, link it to other habits that you have, like brushing and drinking coffee. Resolve to run after brushing and drinking coffee so your established habits becomes your cue. The goal is to put such activities on auto pilot for yourself, where you don’t have to think of them while doing them and Habit Stacking provides you with a way to do just that. Once you carry out your routine activities, you know what you have to do next. It becomes harder to not do that than doing it.

I have read other books on forming habits, but this one has so many simple, practical and actionable ideas that I find myself recommending this book to everyone who asks. It has made its way into my personal list of life-changing books. Being an avid lifelong reader, I don’t give out the top spots to any book lightly. This one is truly a keeper!