Planning for People Who Don’t Plan

Plans change. But it can be powerful to work out a long term theme for your life as a way of grounding your current choices. Last week, I spoke with Pam Slim from Escape from Cubicle Nation about how to navigate my own situation–where my “escape” is involuntary–and came away with some great ideas.

Pam writes about the importance of creating a life plan and basing your work decisions around that instead of simply acting or reacting tactically. It is difficult, especially under the pressure of an impending layoff, to step back and consider the big “what do I want to do with my life” questions. But we don’t need to go that far. It’s helpful just to imagine what you want your life to be like in 3-5 years.

My wife and I sat down for this exercise–which was very difficult for us. We tend to do what we want to do and we are not big on setting specific goals and objectives. It’s not that we don’t think about the future, but we expect to adapt constantly and generally, we get where we want to be. But we sat down and considered the whole range of life issues, beginning with where we wanted to be living.

Home

We like where we are…but we are always reading about other places and thinking about what it might be like to live there. We like moving–not the process of packing up so much, but the excitement of a new city and having to learn everything new again. However, we took a good look around us and said, “we really are in the best place now.” There are always pros and cons, but we look at our 4-year old and realize she will be starting kindergarten next year and we don’t want to be moving her around. She can walk across the street to school…and she will be followed by her two younger brothers over the course of the next 3 years. So really, we need to make our stand now if we want to give that stability to our kids.

We speculate about our location in town too. The house behind us went on the market…there are other houses on quieter streets with sidewalks, etc. But again, we took a look around and realized, our house is great. It would be nice to finish the basement, but why would we want to go through the whole relocation process just to get on a side street? The kids will soon be old enough to smartly cross the street to the sidewalk.

For us, that was a major decision and it settled a number of things. I had been looking into refinancing the mortgage, but some lack of certainty about the future made me hesitate. The next day, I called the bank and, as luck would have it, rates had dropped to super-low levels and we were able to get a 30-year fixed mortgage and a line of credit at a historically low rate.

Relationships and Health

We’ve already changed a great deal in the past 5 years. We started cycling and running and spending more time together. We decided my wife would stay home and raise our kids and that we would find a way to make it work. We decided to join a church and make religion a part of our lives and the education of our children. And, as we described above, we decided stability for the kids was important. So in this area, we felt like we were already moving towards a goal we just had not defined.

Work
I want to work independently and with others, in an office and from home. I want to thoroughly “grounded” in a base here in my home in Westwood, but would like to travel to short events (like SXSW!) occasionally. I want a flexible schedule–not a predictable routine–because I need to fit other things into my life, not be trapped at a desk in an office in Boston. And I want variety.

Sounds pretty ideal and not like many jobs…but I think it is important to just run with the vision a bit…it’s not the job I get in the next month–it is a vision of what my life would be like…what would I be doing on a daily basis.

I’d be talking about social media and citizen empowerment. I would be listening to the interesting people that cause trouble because they care passionately about things. I would be writing and synthesizing what I had learned and participating as a person of consequence in every thing I did. In my paid work, I would be a thought leader, a person people sought out for advice. I would be doing things in technology–never trusting the details to consultants but getting my hands dirty. I would be writing–on my blogs and in books that served to further publicize my message. I would be connecting people, ideas, and technology in a way that made other people feel like they had the ability to influence and direct the future of their community.

So that’s more of a political platform than a job. But if I have that vision, if I really believe that is what I want my future to be like, then I can begin to make decisions about what helps get me there, what is necessary, and what I must leave behind.

An equally important part of the vision is the vision of not standing in line for food stamps, updating my blog from my iPhone, while our house is foreclosed upon. I may have the luxury of a few weeks here to introspect on this blog, but bottom line is I need to find a way to make some money fast. I also believe we have not seen the worst of this economic downturn and the time I have to land something that supports my long term goals is limited. But the vision is useful because if I can fit tactical decisions into a longer term plan, I can act with authenticity and confidence…and ultimately do what needs to get done.