Overbooking vs. Flexplanning
How to deal with the fact that time is WONKY
Welcome to “All the Tasks Fit to Print,” my weekly newsletter on all issues productivity related for authors and other solopreneurs!
This edition is a reprint of an older issue of this newsletter. I will be scattering older essays among the new ones, as I have a substantial backlog from an older blog that few people have read.
When people see my daily to-do lists, they often point out in confusion that I’ve overbooked myself. Which is true! I do it all the time. However, most of the time when I overbook myself, it’s with the full knowledge that I simply do not have enough time or brain power in the day to accomplish all of it.
So why do I do that? Isn’t it stressful to set myself up to fail?
Exactly the opposite, honestly.
The fact is that not everybody functions well with a precisely to-the-minute daily schedule. I, for one, find looking at those very busy calendar layouts with every minute accounted for to be extremely anxiety producing. A very full calendar day with time blocks nestled up to each other like legos makes me nervous! Props to those who find such tools helpful and motivational, but can’t be me.
Yet traditional productivity gurus preach that the only path to success is to schedule your life this way, making “every second count!”
(Who is counting, anyway???)
Instead of stressing myself out with unrealistic expectations, I actually practice what I call “flexplanning.”
What is flexplanning and why did I come up with it as a way to manage my daily task list?
Flexplanning is building flexibility and opportunity into your schedule.
Flexplanning is based on these two facts of life:
Time is wonky and our perception of time even wonkier;
Life is unpredictable.
For solopreneurs, these two basic laws of the universe have major impacts on our productivity. Yet, most solopreneurs keep trying to hold back the tide of daily life in order to make it all fit into a carefully crafted box daily schedule.
Let’s take a closer look at why that rarely is as productive as the productivity gurus promise you.
Time is Wonky
Most of the time, people overbook their task list because they don’t understand how much time the tasks actually take.
The common advice is that you schedule something for the amount of time you think it will take to accomplish, then triple that. You think it will take you thirty minutes to write a blog? How about more like one hour and thirty minutes!
We also think that given an hour we can do five things, each which takes twenty minutes. Yeah, do the math on that…it doesn’t add up. But we keep compacting our schedule to fit more and more into less and less time, hoping (praying?) that we can somehow shave down the time for each task just enough to fit ever more things into that slot.
I am not immune to that kind of optimism, especially with things I have not done often or ever. It’s a natural impulse to believe we can do something quickly and that we can do a lot of things in a small time frame, especially if our schedule is already full of other obligations.
But you know as well as I do that it’s a false hope which more often than not just leaves us falling behind on all our plans.
Life is Unpredictable
Shit happens every damn day. If you are a solopreneur, you are the one juggling everything and then picking it all up when all the balls crash to the ground.
We don’t have a team who can help us catch up if we fall behind. We don’t have colleagues we can call on to cover for us if a meeting runs long or a project requires extra work. We have very few resources to pitch in and work with us to get everything course corrected on those days when website technical difficulties collide with our youngest kid getting sick at school and the plumber showing up in fifteen minutes to fix the broken kitchen sink.
It really doesn’t matter how well scheduled your day is; if you are not rich enough to have a staff running behind you to pick up all the slack then you will end up falling behind. (If you are that rich, congratulations! Here’s my ko-fi!)
Flexplanning
If dialing in your daily schedule to tight increments inspires you and keeps you on target for your goals, disregard this advice! But if you, like me, end up flailing about with wonky time and unpredictable life events, then the solution might be a bit of flexplanning.
There are a lot of ways to make a full day productive but as the old saying goes: no battle plan survives the battlefield intact! So instead of trying to shoehorn your schedule into a very regimented box, consider building a bigger box around your schedule.
What does that mean? For me, it means putting more things on the schedule than I can do so that I am free to choose what I will do.
My real goal is to get about ⅔ of my to-do list done, but I allow myself to choose which tasks to meet that goal as I go along.
Did writing that blog post take a lot more research and brain power than I planned on? Then instead of working on new project creation, which is brain power intensive, I might work on formatting a WIP or scheduling some tweets on hypefury or just updating a website…things that need to get done, but aren’t as mentally draining as creative writing.
Did that zoom meeting with a client run over by, whoops, a whole hour? No biggie. Instead of tackling the complex two-hour task that’s next on my list, I skip it for the thirty-minute task I know I can get done and still meet up with a colleague for lunch.
The flip side is true, too. If updating my website turned into a tangle of technical issues that sucked up three hours instead of fifteen minutes (true story! 😭), then all I might be good for after that is doing research for future blog posts, a.k.a. watching some vids by my fave productivity youtubers.
What looks like overbooking is actually planning for flexibility.
There are, of course, days when I must do things in a certain order. If I have meetings and deadlines, I need to meet them. You can’t make too many changes to things like picking the kids up from school, or doctor appointments for you or your partner, or academic classes you must attend. On the other hand, sometimes meetings get canceled, or the doctor is running late, or you have to stay late after class to organize a group project (my deepest sympathies!).
Even then, though, try to put extra things on your schedule to allow for the fact that anything can happen!
This is also a great solution for people with neurodivergent brains who do not like regimented schedules, and/or are unable to predict what they want to work on or are able to work on in any given day.
tl;dr: If tightly scheduled daily calendars/to-do lists keep getting derailed and/or stress you out, maybe try flexplanning instead.