I love to plan things. When most people hear that, their brain jumps to someone with an excel-sheet timetable running their lives, someone who knows exactly what they’re doing tomorrow at 10:34 and someone who probably isn’t very adaptable to changing plans.

I am here to tell you that plans and schedules are different things, and that I love the former, but get really stressed out by the latter.

Planning feels freeing to me. You take an idea, and you turn it into possibility. It becomes something tangible, that you have an understanding of, whether it’s costs, duration, expectations, rewards. You can then shelf it until you have the time and energy for it, and this is where my generous use of note taking is useful, as the shelved idea is no longer taking up space in my brain, but it is not lost either.

In contrast, schedules feel restrictive and binding. A schedule is the elimination of possibility, once you commit to a plan for Tuesday evening, you have effectively given up on all alternative possibilities for Tuesday evening. And because of my brain, I also need time the thing starts to prepare for the thing, so a day with multiple things scheduled some hours apart is genuinely exhausting for, even if the things are fun. Sometimes you can’t avoid scheduling, e.g a long trip, or an event with multiple folks, but for the most time, you can delay it pretty well.

So, in short, I love planning things, and keeping my days free, so that I can decide when I want those plans to materialize.