Second Cup: Planning is like GPS

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 that planning is like GPS. Even if circumstances change and you need to change your route, having a plan will still help you get where you are going. Today's tip comes from Rebecca Rocha's podcast, On a recent episode, she compared planning to GPS. She said, making a plan for how to get to your goal is like using Google Maps to work out a route for somewhere you need to be. You know it is giving you what looks like the best route at the time, but you also know the route it gives you might change as you go along. That's part of the deal. I love that analogy. I think it does a few things. First,

0:59 it establishes that plans are valuable. even if not everything goes according to plan. Without a planned route, getting to a destination you are unfamiliar with will be tricky. I mean, maybe there will be signs. Maybe it will work out. But the odds are reasonable that you will get lost somewhere and log way more travel time than required, even if you do ultimately get where you are going. Similarly, having a plan for how you are going to write a book or go back to school or even how to get everyone to their activities this weekend, drastically increases the chances that these things happen. Second, thinking of a plan as being like GPS means acknowledging that you might need to recalculate the route. Perhaps a road will be closed,

1:52 or GPS will pick up a traffic jam that didn't exist when you left the house. If so, the GPS can help you adjust. Same with a plan. As you encounter varying conditions or challenges, you can adjust parts of it as necessary to help you get where you are going. And finally, thinking of plans as being like GPS acknowledges that plans are a tool. The ultimate goal is to get to your destination. GPS is a really cool tool to help you optimize getting where you are going. Likewise, plans are a smart way to make sure that goals are achievable. The plans themselves are not the most important part.

2:36 If you plan to train for a 10K by running on your treadmill in the morning before work, and you drop a long list of prescribed morning treadmill workouts, and you come to realize that you cannot stand the boredom of being on your treadmill, you can come up with a different plan. Instead of running four miles on the treadmill in the morning, you run four miles outside at lunch on a work-from-home day. You take your running clothes to the office and run the prescribed three miles outside after work before it gets dark. The plan was one way to achieve your goal. There are probably others. GPS can often give you multiple routes, and you can choose based on what matters to you. What I especially like

3:20 about this analogy is that it answers the common criticism that life doesn't go according to plan. Ergo, There is no point planning. This is just silly. If you are trying to get to a meeting in another city, and along the way your GPS system encounters a closed road and recalculates, this doesn't mean there is no point in GPS.

3:43 I mean, hey, we should just get in the car and see where life takes us. Enjoy the drive. I mean, I enjoy the drive a lot more when I have a reasonable sense where I am going. Same with plans. 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. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at Laura at LauraVanderkam.com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeart Media. For more podcasts from iHeart Media, please visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.