Guest Post: Failure to Plan – SweetBlondesFitLife

Failure to plan

…is a plan to fail.

Before I go any farther, let me introduce myself! Many of you may know me as Katie’s BFF. 🙂 I’m Sarah and I blog over at www.sweetblondesfitlife.com . Many of you have probably read about how our friendship started, if you haven’t you can check out Katie’s blog post here. I’m so very thankful to have met Katie!! Seriously. I was thinking about that today, and honestly I don’ know what I would do without her. Despite being so far away, she is one of my best friends. I have learned so much from her and I cannot wait to see her again soon.  I’ll save more of my gushing about her for later 😀

Anyway, back to what I was saying. Failure to plan is a plan to fail. Let’s face it people, it’s a harsh reality. Planning sucks, nobody wants to take the time to do it.  It’s like a necessary evil. It seems so much easier to fly by the seat of our pants.  While it is easier, the results aren’t usually what you were going for… Recently I have had to learn to deal with planning a very hectic life, and it’s not as time consuming or boring as it seems. In this post I am going to share with you my tips and tricks on how to make a plan so you don’t fail!

Katie and I have conversations about this kinda thing all the time. It’s something we have both had to learn to overcome. I’ve texted her before and said things like “why does working out and eating right have to be so time-consuming???” Or, “I really really really don’t want to meal prep tonight”

Both of us are busy women with full time jobs, goals, a few hobbies and to top it off, we like to sweat. It takes some work to fit it all in!! To give you some insight into my life, for me with my job right now I’m working 50 to 60 hour weeks. And when it’s really busy, I work around 70 hours a week. As you can probably imagine, there are days that I definitely don’t feel like I have time to workout! I make the time because if I don’t fit in some exercise, you probably don’t want to be around me. This girl gets irritable… trust me!

Like I said, the unfortunate thing about failing to plan, is that is a plan to fail. Lately with my schedule and commitments, my life has required a lot of planning. There have been a few moments recently that I have really taken the time to sit down and carefully plan out each aspect of my life – workouts, eating/meals, blog time, personal time, work time, sleep time, goals and errands/to-do list. When I took the little extra time to plan out/think thru every part of my life, I noticed how much smoother things went.

Here is what I used to do – I figured out what to eat, when to work out and then would wing the rest.  I would throw together a meal plan for the week, grocery shop, figure out what days I would work out in the morning, what days I would have to work out in the evening, and then get on with the next most urgent thing. This fits things in, but feels very hectic. I wasn’t failing at ALL areas of my life as I had a plan in place for some areas (health and fitness), but there was certainly room for improvement.

I know what you are thinking… “planning out everything sounds boring”. Believe me, I thought the same thing! I am a spontaneous person and having lots of options is what makes life fun and fresh to me. However, what I have realized was that just because I had a plan doesn’t mean that life is boring. In fact, having a plan gave me more time to do what I wanted.

Here are 3 simple steps I follow to plan out my day/week:

1. If it’s not scheduled, it’s not gonna happen!
   Everything that is important to you or something you absolutely have to get done – schedule it! Use whatever scheduling tool you prefer like a calendar app on your phone or a paper planner. Treat important things to you like business meetings, there is no cancelling and no rescheduling unless something super important comes up. What does this mean, your workout is a business meeting with yourself! No cancelling because you are tired.
2. Take 10 minutes a day (or less) to plan out your day (or the next day).
   You can either do this first thing in the morning, or at night before bed. Take a moment and figure out what you MUST do and what you would like to do. Make an outline for the day and when you are doing each thing. Don’t be too hard on yourself if things don’t end up as planned. On rough days when nothing seems to be going right, my plan still helped me stay focused and get more done than I would have if I didn’t have a plan at all.
   **I also like to take time on weekend to roughly plan the upcoming week!
3. Do the hardest thing first!
   Take a look at your list and figure out what will have the most impact on your day, or what will take the longest and get that out of the way first! If you work at 5AM and can’t get much done before work, that’s okay, just do this task as soon as you can. Usually the things that take the longest or have the biggest impact are the ones that we procrastinate on the most. For example, meal prep is time consuming, so I used to leave it till the last min on Sunday nights and then was rushing to get it done, went to bed late, and Monday as rough. If I had done that first my day would have been much easier. So get the tough stuff out of the way first!

Try 1 of these 3 tips, or better yet, all 3 of them, this week. It will be hard a first because it is something different. Apply it to just one area, like meal prep/planning. Plan out what to eat and when, make your list, shop, and prep. Then each night prep get all your meals ready for the next day. I promise that this small change will make a big difference and you will find that eating healthy isn’t as hard as it seems because it’s already done. Then you can slowly start to plan other areas of your life one at a time.

Have you ever tried something like this? Do you have any stories about when you failed to plan it was a plan to fail? I would love to hear them!!

XOXO
Talk to you guys soon!
Stay Sweet!