I’m a planner, and whether I want to be or not, my mind just starts to push out and extrapolate on the present to derive the future. Lately I’ve been finding that its quite difficult to plan in multiple areas of my life at the same time. Each tendril of a plan tends to have its own agenda, calling on my attention to meet its own conclusions, but attention is an increasingly limited resource.

Most of the time, I enjoy the process of planning. Getting the steps aligned, delivering the objective, and building on the effort of prior work. I get a lot out of the process, and over time the practice of planning itself starts to improve, which only feeds into the process. So I won’t say that a plan that never gets executed is a waste of time, or energy. I will say, however, that at some point you need to deliver something.

I’m learning to reign in my tendency to continue down a path trying to know where each is headed. This is one my many meta-projects. Its the fear that creeps up telling me that if I don’t understand the conclusions, I can’t be sure these actions are of the highest value, for whatever measure of value.

Perhaps its the nature of my profession that has continuously reinforced these neural pathways or whatever, but increasingly its deep work that engages me and that from which I feel a sense of satisfaction. But for me, engaging in deep work in a professional context does not help me engage in deep work in any of my personal contexts.

The planning I’ve yet to do needs some deep work. Not just a few minutes here or there. And so the question that I ask my self, from my backyard hammock, one Sunday night, in the cool air with a glass of home-brew cider, is what’s the next step? Always the same question. What’s the next step?

This question might be the only lever I have to pry myself into action. Determine the single next move that I can make for one of my many projects and do it. This moves the whole machinery forward. The clock ticks just one more notch further along the project. And I find that after I take that next step, the landscape looks just a little different, and the view is a maybe little better from this vantage point, and maybe there’s a sunrise on the horizon, or some epic rain clouds. And if you’re like me, knowing specifically what the next step is makes a huge difference on the possibility of that job getting done, be it breakfast or retirement.

And so for me, the only way to make progress in multiple areas is to make progress on any of them. Only through action am I able to clear that which blocks either my mind or my body. Only through action have I been able to change my own landscape.