No Planning Required

Photo by Hossein Soltanloo on Unsplash

While driving around running errands one weekday, my wife and I went through the automatic car wash at a local gas station. We didn’t plan on getting the car washed when we got gas. We just knew we needed to fill up because gas prices are going up again and the car was, luckily, low on gas. Then we saw the car wash. Then “we” washed the car.

I’ve been through plenty of automatic car washes in my lifetime. But my wife hasn’t. At least not one at the gas station. And neither of us had seen soap suds like this before. (I had no idea they made tie-dyed soap.)

I would usually wait until the weekend to do something like this, but that would be only if I was going to do it myself. But it was a Tuesday afternoon and the car wash wasn’t busy and our car could’ve used a cleaning.

So we made the call. It wasn’t planned, but we did it anyway. It just made sense in that moment.

It cost us about 10 bucks, but it’s going to save us a whole bunch of time later on. This is the type of thing that we didn’t need to do ourselves, so we didn’t. We picked the right time, the right place, and the right action — and we did it with a moment’s notice. No plan needed.

Sometimes that’s what personal productivity is. All of those things done with just a moment’s notice.

Time management and productivity doesn’t need to be planned to perfection — or even close to perfection. It just needs to allow you to carry forth an intention of paying attention to the right time and place for it.

If you do that often enough, then then over time you’ll be able to do it at a moment’s notice.