Are Carry-Over Plans Killing You?
Jan 18, 2023Somewhere between the years of 2017 and 2020, I journaled about writing a novel no less than one hundred million times. A dramatization, obviously, but it was a lot. I picked up On Writing by Stephen King and devoured it. I signed up for fiction writing classes and workshops. Plot and character ideas were scribbled on the notes in my phone. I even had a few friends and my agent read some early pages.
Each year, I came no closer to writing (much less finishing) a novel than the year before. So, I’d carry it over. Into the next shiny journal she’d go.
Carry-over plans. They’re those nagging “I really wanna” intentions. The half-ass tried, maybe one day wishes. But one day never comes so we keep transferring that wish-dream-goal-plan-intention over to the next calendar year. This is the year.
As someone who is very guilty of creating carry-over plans (Write a novel! Re-learn spanish! Re-learn my violin! Reno the bathroom!), they happen for a few reasons:
We took no action.
We didn’t know what action to take.
We’re not emotionally in touch with what motivated (or de-motivated) that plan.
We’re afraid to commit.
We’d rather talk about the plan than do the plan.
When I think back on why I kept carrying over the “write a novel” plan year-after-year, it was a combination of all of these. I wasn’t invested or committed to the craft in such a way that I’d create a flywheel of finishing it. Ya’ll, I have about one-fifth of three different books written. But I didn’t really know what I was doing (and I’m not that great at investing time in something when I don’t know if I’m getting better).
It’s the start of 2023 and just a few days ago I was going through, page-by-page, my three beta readers’ feedback of my novel. I cried a couple different times, I think because I was so proud that I did it…I got this thing on the page…and aside from their incredibly helpful feedback, they all really enjoyed it. To see the words “page-turner” written in someone’s feedback for the first time will never not make me cry. Ha!
My carry-over plan to write a novel turned into a plan realized (while not yet finished!) SIX YEARS after first writing down my desire to do so. And the reason I was able to ensure that it doesn't get carried over another calendar year is because I did a few exercises that you might find worth considering.
Am I just carrying this over to carry it over? Sometimes we say we want to do things because the saying of it is more gratifying than the doing of it. Sometimes we say we want to do something because we think we should. Or because we’ve always said that that’s something we wanted to do. Investigate what’s really going on and if you can let the plan go…do it. Just don’t carry it over. Say goodbye to it.
Standing in the shoes of your future self. I remember saying how pissed I’d be if I died and never wrote a novel. That was a pretty good indicator to me that this was seriously something I wanted to do, but I needed a better game-plan in order to do it. Your future self has plenty of wisdom like that. She’ll tell you what she really wants you to get done this year or this month. It’s why I built a future-self exercise into my Goals-Free Guidebook (which you should totally dig into!)
Make a better plan for executing. To stop carrying it over, you’re going to have to do things differently than you did in previous years. For me that came down to a few things: commitment, investment, and accountability. I committed to learning the craft. I invested financially and time-wise into that commitment. And I made sure there was built-in accountability.
It’s exhausting to keep setting a finish-line for yourself that you never come close to crossing. If that’s you in any area of your life (your health, your relationships, your work, your dreams), then hopefully this can get you thinking about a better way.
So, take a moment and consider…what plans do you keep writing down each year only to never realize them? Let’s change that by trusting ourselves this year to find a better way forward. Or having the courage to throw the plan out all together.
Woman on xx
