Yes, I have become a victim of my own carefully crafted scheme of planning hell. After carefully analysing my life over last few months, that is hacking my life, I finally found the bug.
Let me explain what happened. Even I was shocked at the finesse of the deception and how it victimised me for so long.
I was probably at my emotionally lowest stage in my life. As they say, when you hit the bottom, only way is up. So I started asking relevant questions. Quora, Medium, Google and some coincidental movies - all helped me to come out of my misery. Though things are very personal at micro level, I figured there are 3 or 4 phases at macro level to find the purpose of life and lead a content one.
Analyse -> Plan -> Execute -> Evaluate -> Make corrections -> Execute (The cycle goes on).
Analyse
I carefully analysed, what I had, what I longed to have, what I needed to have and things that I can't have. Then, what I want to become - some realistic goals, how to achieve these goals. I realised, if I know my worst case scenario, it gives a lot of confidence as I know, I can't loose more than that. Actually it gives immense psychological confidence. Here I set a lot of goals, all of which may not be achieved, its OK to have fallback goals.
Plan
Next, after prioritising the goals, planned my steps to achieve them. Here everything seems to be well planned. A lot of stuff is written about this on the internet. Many folks have cautioned the danger of being in this phase for a long time. I fell victim here too. Dreaming about achieving the goals. This initially gives some Dopamine that gives a false impression that I am making progress. Over time, I started realising something was not correct. I am not making real progress. It didn't take much time to detect this and fix.
After this false success, I laid objective plans, like
- I have to finish a course in a month.
- Revamp the blog and update regularly.
- Read lot of books etc.
Here is where my genius brain induced the bug. For every step, I keep a pre-requisite step and trivialise it. I mean this pre-requisite step is so simple that I could do anytime.
For example, the pre-requisite of writing blog regularly was to revamp the look and feel. That is so easy and I can do it anytime. Why now? When I am thinking this way, I am deliberately missing that this small, trivial step is blocking my progress over to the execution phase.
Same happens in upskilling goal. I shortlist the courses that I want to finish. Then I think I can just sign up for the course anytime, why now? There I blocked my progress to the execution phase.
Misery
I will keep blaming these trivial stuff are blocking my progress. When Dopamine wears off, I again go into the miserable state. Since I have already been there, this time I fall into a local minima. It is easy to rise from here. Then I feel confident again, because it is not new, I have already risen from a global minima.
The vicious cycle
The cycle continues. The depth of fall is quite shallow and frequency of the cycle increases.
It appears like an elaborate scheme of mine to cheat myself. I don't know if I knew it all along so objectively or I was a real victim. Now that I know the problem and the solution. I hope I can make a progress to the execution phase. Execute -> Evaluate -> Correct -> Execute is also a cycle, but that would have made me a better human being and a content one too.
This post appears to be lacking finesse but I am not falling into the same trap :)
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