Second Cup: Map out your time line

0:03 Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good morning. This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's tip is to map out your timeline. By figuring out all the steps in a project, and when you might be able to do each step, you can have a much better sense of whether something is doable. And you will have a much better shot at success if you do give the project a whirl. We are coming toward the end of this year, which means I am nearing the end of this year's project of listening to all the works of Bach. I have really enjoyed doing this project, but key to making this project work was having a plan. First, I needed to know that there were 1,080 works in the official BWV catalog. There are a few more fragments

1:05 and lost works and misattributed works, but we don't need to become esoteric scholars here. 1,080 sounded good enough. Then I needed to know how to split the listening each day. Well, theoretically, you could just do three each day. Some of Bach's works are much longer than others, and some of the long ones are right next to each other in the catalog.

1:30 Listening to the St. Matthew's Passion and St. John's Passion back-to-back would be more than four hours of listening, whereas listening to three chorales back-to-back might be less than three minutes. So probably marching straight through wouldn't work. I also realized that I would like some variety. Bach wrote choral works, organ works, orchestral works, but the BWV numbers put all of the works of a kind together. So I created a schedule assigning myself different BWV numbers from different parts of the catalog each day, which totaled about 30 to 40 minutes of listening. How did I know the listening time?

2:16 I searched for each BWV number and saw how long the performances were. Creating this calendar took a fair amount of work, but I would do one to two months at a time, so it was never overwhelming. Then I would just spot check that I was on track. After two months, would I have been listening to about a sixth of the catalog? In any case, the upside of having detailed assignments for each day was that after all of that, the project was pretty easy to stick to.

2:50 On any given day, I am not deciding what to listen to or how much to listen to. I am just listening to a violin sonata and a few chorales today and something else tomorrow. At this point, I've listened to almost everything. I think if you're going to do any sort of project like this, you need a detailed roadmap.

3:15 I interviewed someone recently who was visiting all of America's national parks. This required a detailed outline of how many days it takes to see each one and which are close. and which require lots of advanced reservations, and which are a little bit more accessible. But doing that meant that such a comprehensive project was actually doable over a few summers. Likewise, folks who are participating in National Novel Writing Month in November know that you need to crank out 50,000 words in a month. But this is much more doable if you know that this is 1,667 words on each of 30 days. Or 2,000 words a day if you plan to work 25 days, taking the five Sundays off. Or 2,500 words a day if you plan to take Saturdays

4:06 and Sundays off. If you don't know your expected daily word count, on the other hand, it's going to be a lot harder. Now, 2,500 words a day might sound like a lot. That means you are writing 2,500 words on Thanksgiving. And if that does sound like a lot, well, maybe you decide that you don't actually want to start this project and then give up somewhere in the middle.

4:32 And that is a rational choice. But if you see where you can fit 2,500 words a day into your life, and you know that this is your expected pace, you stand a pretty good chance of succeeding. Maps help us get where we are going. we see how far we need to go and how much time it will take. That helps us make more rational choices. Most people understand that you cannot drive 500 miles in five hours. Best case scenario, that is a nine to 10 hour trip.

5:10 If you know where you will stop for lunch and stop to stretch your legs along the road, you will find it all more doable than if it looks like just a huge number of miles. So if you're contemplating any big project, map out your timeline. What do you need to do when? How much do you need to get done on each day to stay on track? You might decide not to bite off the project. But if you do, your odds of success will be good if you have designed the timeline well. In the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening. And here's to making the most of our time. Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast.

6:03 If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at laura at lauravandercam.com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeart Media, please visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.