Why you can't stick to your timelines
Picture it. You have a project on the go (any kind of project: work, home, creative, personal) and in order to keep yourself on track and accountable, you make a timeline. You plot out what you want to work on and when you want to hit key milestones. You put it all in a chart, or your planner, or your digital calendar. It seems doable. You have a plan. You feel confident.
I think you know what comes next. You miss your first goal, or one of the stages takes forever, or, most likely, life intervenes with an interruption that throws everything off. Now the timeline feels more like an indictment of your failures than a map to success.
But what if we’re thinking about these timelines all wrong? What if their purpose isn’t to push us toward (often arbitrary) deadlines or to keep us on a strict schedule of progress?
So many of my coaching clients want help sticking to the timelines they create for themselves. I can help them devise strategies for making progress, but neither of us can control when a family emergency hits or accurately predict how long each component will take. They inevitably feel disheartened, or worse, beat themselves up for their perceived inability to stay on track. Often, this leads to the plan - and sometimes the whole project - being abandoned or shelved indefinitely.
When it comes to the timelines we draw up, I’m starting to believe that we need to rethink their role and our relationship to them.
What if we saw the timeline as less about time, i.e., the exact dates and time frames it contains, and more about structure? When you’re just trying to give some shape to a project that may take months or years, what you typically want is a way to break it into discrete stages so you know what to focus on at any given point. It may not matter all that much whether you hit milestone A on a specific date. What matters is that you know what milestone A is and what you need to do to get there.
Maybe we can understand our timelines as ways to make sense of complex, medium-to-long term goals that need to be chunked down into digestible bits. The “time” part gives us something to work toward, but perhaps it’s not really the important thing.
Instead, we could treat the time factor as flexible and focus more on what we’ve actually done rather than why we didn’t meet a self-imposed deadline. After all, we’re the ones who made the timeline in the first place - it makes no sense to act as if it’s been forced on us from an invisible higher power.
I think we can’t stick to our timelines because we’re not meant to. Time is just one possible measure of progress. We can use timelines as a tool for planning but maybe it’s time to stop using them as a tool for discipline, shame, and disappointment.
What I’m reading: Still working on the very long Demon Copperhead. I’m at the point in the story where things are going well for the protagonist, which is stressful because you know it’s not going to continue this way!
What I’m watching: The second season of The Snow Girl. Gotta get my Spanish practice in.