Planning your dream life.
I’m a huge advocate of planning. I love to plan. It's a favourite way to spend my time… planning holidays or adventures in the campervan, finding new cute cafes for coffee, searching for fun activities for myself and the children, or coming up with the plan for a party or event.
In a work context, it might look like goal setting, planning blog posts, or workshops… planning my networking events and so on.
I also love to plan my weeks in advance, for personal and work… you get the gist.
I'm of the opinion that a plan is important. I don't find it constraining, and I don't think it hampers my creativity… if anything I find it fuels my creativity.
If you do create a plan, the next step is to use it.
Here's a real-life example for you… I was having a driveway built at the front of my house. The contractors were excavating the land to dig out said driveway (my house is elevated in relation to the road). As you would expect, there was a plan drawn up.
However, it transpired that the contractors were out of their depth and when the project got halted mid-way through we discovered that my car didn't fit into the driveway - they had built the retaining wall in the wrong place (i.e. they hadn't followed the plan). I then had a mud pit (which we affectionally called the quagmire) as my front garden for 18 months! If only they'd followed the plan!! 😆
How to plan your day / week
So I think that planning your schedule (day / week) could be a whole separate post, and I do have a free video lesson on time blocking which might be of interest to you. You’ll find it here. I promise I’ll come back to this topic too in future posts.
Goal setting and planning your dream life
For the purpose of this post, however, I wanted to write a little about goal setting and perhaps planning in the context of thinking about your dream life.
Like planning, you might find the idea of goal setting for your personal life a bit tedious and perhaps pointless. But, like planning, I do think it’s a worthwhile exercise.
Firstly you’re going to want to have an idea of where you’d like to be in 1, 3 or 5 years time. I love to take people through a future self visualisation for this, but another idea is to just spend a bit of time writing in a notebook or journal and see what comes up. You can write out a diary entry, as if it’s a particular date in the future, and try not to edit what you’re writing… just see what flows.
I’ve got more information on goal setting in this post from earlier in the year >>> Are New Year’s resolutions a waste of time?
Future Vision >>>
I’ve also previously shared some thoughts on visualisation and vision boards in an Instagram live - check it out here.
Whatever your goal might be, having a project mindset automatically nudges things up the priority list.
“Having a project mindset automatically nudges things up the priority list. I created a ‘35 at 35’ list as a personal project when I turned 30... it listed 35 things I wanted to achieve before I turned 35. I didn’t manage to tick everything off my list, but the presence of the list gave me something to aim for.”
For one of my own personal projects, I created a ‘35 at 35’ list. When I turned 30, I wrote a list of 35 things I wanted to achieve before I turned 35. Some were little adventures (go on a picnic), others were huge (fall in love again was on the list for instance!!). I didn’t manage to tick everything off my list, but the presence of the list gave me something to aim for.
I had also shared it with my blog readers, and so there was an element of accountability there too. If you want to have a nosey at my original list, you’ll find it here on my Glasgow Mummy blog.
You could create your own version, or perhaps a 23 for 2023 list?
Some other ideas of personal projects
A solo adventure each month (I’ve a blog post here on ideas for Artist Dates, a concept created by Julia Cameron in her book The Artist’s Way).
Alphabet date night, e.g. A is for American food, B is for Bingo, C is for Curling, D is for Dancing… and so on.
Themed dinners at home, e.g. Mexican night, Spanish tapas
And lastly is the ‘List of 100 dreams’ which I discovered via Laura Vanderkam in her book, 168 Hours. The list is “a completely unedited list of anything you might want to do or have more of in life”. I’ve written my list, and let me tell you, it’s tricky to think of 100 things! (I have however already ticked off two items, which feels good!).