Are you a Procrastiplanner? Here’s how to Actually Start the Thing
Are you a Procrastiplanner? Here’s how to Actually Start the Thing
Do you find yourself endlessly planning—rewriting to-do lists, over-researching, or fine-tuning details—until you’re too overwhelmed to actually start? You’re not alone, especially if you have ADHD or struggle with executive function challenges.
As an executive function & ADHD coach, I see this pattern all the time. Planning can feel productive and comforting—it gives you a sense of control and helps organize your chaotic thoughts. But too often, it becomes a trap that holds you back.
In this post, we’ll explore how to balance planning and action, a concept I call the “Goldilocks Effect of Planning.” You’ll also learn to spot three signs that it’s time to stop planning and take messy action.
The Planning Trap: When Good Intentions Keep You Stuck
I love planning; it’s my superpower and literally my job, but even as an executive function and ADHD coach, I’ve experienced the downside of over-planning firsthand.
Take, for example, the time I wanted to paint my office. I spent weeks obsessing over details: choosing the perfect rug to match the paint, finding the “right” day to move furniture, and more. This perfectionism delayed the project for months—until one day, my partner said, “Let’s just do it.”
Within 24 hours, my office was painted and beautiful. The relief I felt was a powerful reminder that imperfect action beats endless planning every time.
The Goldilocks Effect: How to Balance Planning and Action
Planning is essential, but too much or too little can paralyze progress. That’s where the “Goldilocks Effect” comes in—finding a balance that’s “just right” (not perfect!).
Here are three red flags that it’s time to stop planning and start doing:
Planning Takes Longer Than the Task Itself
If the time you spend planning exceeds the time it takes to complete the task, you’re likely stuck.For instance, one client agonized for 30 minutes over when to download a file—a task that took less than a minute once she finally acted.
Perfectionism is Blocking Progress
Perfectionism whispers that you need the “perfect” plan before starting. The truth? You don’t.Ask yourself, “Do I have enough information to take the first step?” Then you’re ready.
Planning is Becoming A Form of “Productive” Procrastination
Sometimes, planning feels like productivity but is actually avoidance. Color-coding your calendar or rewriting lists might feel good, but it doesn’t move the needle. Challenge yourself to embrace the discomfort of starting.
Practical Tips to Break Free from Over-Planning
Ask Yourself: What’s My Goal Here?
Reflect: Are you planning to make progress, or are you stuck in analysis paralysis? This check-in can help you pivot toward action.
Embrace Messy Action
Let go of perfectionism. Starting imperfectly is better than waiting for the “perfect” conditions.
Match Your Energy Levels
Not ready to dive in? Create a menu of tasks based on your energy: low-effort tasks for sluggish days, creative projects for inspired moments, or high-focus work when you’re in the zone.
Why ADHD and Executive Function Challenges Magnify Procrasti-Planning
If you have ADHD, planning can usually go one of two ways: you overplan or you avoid planning all together. However, hyperfocus on planning can keep you from the actions that matter most. Executive function skills like task initiation and prioritization are critical—but they require practice.
This is where an ADHD coach can help. Whether you need strategies for balancing planning with action or tools to improve follow-through, coaching offers personalized support.
Ready to Find Your Planning Sweet Spot?
If this resonates, consider joining my coaching membership, Stuck to Started. It’s designed for individuals with ADHD or executive function struggles who want to break free from overthinking. You’ll get:
Weekly tools to overcome analysis paralysis.
Coworking sessions to tackle your to-dos in real time.
Monthly reflection workshops to fine-tune your systems.
Planning is a tool, not a destination. By finding your Goldilocks Planning Zone, you can take meaningful action with confidence and clarity.
Next Steps: Take Action Today
If you’re ready to stop planning and start taking action, working with an executive function coach might be the right support!
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Sarah Lovell (00:00)
Do you rewrite your to-do list four to five times and then feel so exhausted from all that thinking and planning that then you don't do anything on the list at all? Or do you find yourself going round and round and round in circles, trying to make sure every detail of your plan is perfect before you can take action? If you're someone who spends more time planning than you actually do taking action,
This episode is for you. I am sharing a controversial opinion that sometimes you need to skip the plan and just jump in. So let's do it.
So I love a good plan. I am a planner. I get a lot of joy coming up with a plan, brainstorming. I like when I have options, when I have my time estimates, when I have an idea of what I can expect, feeling like I have a little sense of control of things with my planning. I enjoy planning.
My job is literally to help other people plan. So I know this episode topic is a little controversial, but sometimes planning truly holds you back. Sometimes you need to plan less. Sometimes it's really good to skip the plan and just jump in. And I know that is the opposite of what I normally say.
But this is something I talk about with clients. It's something I practice for myself. It's this idea of it can't be all or nothing. We can't always be planning or we can't always be flying by the seat of our pants. We have to have this, you know, flexibility in our thinking and in our systems where, sometimes we are sitting down and writing out a plan and problem solving and creating a roadmap for ourselves before we take action. And sometimes
You need to just go with it, right? So this happened to me several months ago where I caught myself, it happens to me more than that, but this very specific story sticks out in my mind. So I want to share it with you. Basically, I caught myself trying to create the perfect plan and that kept me from taking action. So the goal was to paint my home office.
I spend a lot of time in my office and it was this like slate gray color and I wanted it to be, you know, a little bit happier, jazzier, exciting in my office. And so I went into kind of like planning mode around this. First, I needed to get a new rug because I wanted to pick the color off of the rug. So I found this rug that I'm truly obsessed with.
no piece of furniture has ever brought me as much joy as this rug does. It's just multicolor and a funky pattern and it's a small office. So it just like pops the room. So I was like, great, I have a rug. I can pick a color based on this rug because I'm somebody that decision fatigue is real analysis paralysis is real. I
I'm a slow decision maker. I always joke that like when I'm standing in line toward our ice cream in the summer, like I love when the line is long because I need more time to decide what flavor I'm gonna get, right? Like I'm just a slow decision maker in all areas of my life. But especially with something as quote unquote permanent as paint, right? I got it into my head. Like I need to pick the perfect color. I need to have the most tight,
is that even a saying? Whatever. Like I needed to have the right plan to paint my office because I zoom from there Monday through Thursday. So I was like, okay, I need to make sure that paint is going to dry. I have to figure out when I'm going to take the furniture out, like all these things, right? It needed to be perfect. Which if you've listened to my other episodes, you know I'm a recovering perfectionist. There should have been flags going off in my head, but there weren't in that moment.
or in this multiple moments. This was like over the course of weeks and months that I was like thinking about painting my office and quote unquote planning to paint my office. So this was something that I was talking about every once in a while. Like, I just need to paint my office. I just need to make a plan. you know, when am I going to do it? Right. And my partner who is amazing for lots of reasons was like, let's do it today.
And my brain started exploding when he said that. All the alarms were going off. Like that is not an option. We needed to plan this weeks in advance. I needed to have a checklist. I needed to like think more about color swatches. That needed to be its own week event, right? Like I needed to spend a week looking at the swatches in my office while I was on Zoom. Like this, this, was not like a let's just do it today thing ever in my mind.
And he like challenged me on that. He's like, how long have you been thinking about doing this? How long have you been like planning to plan to do this? Like what? Like you're stuck. You need to, let's just do it today. His brain is clearly wired differently than mine. So he supported me through this. And so we went to the store. He brought it up over coffee. We went to the store after breakfast.
And we did do some planning. I think this is important to acknowledge. We looked at what supplies do we have? What do we need to buy? He measured the room and did the math and figured out how much paint we would write, all those things. He did some of the basic planning that was required. But he didn't let my over-planning brain paralyze me. So we went to the store.
I somehow picked out a paint color in like 15 minutes, which is the fastest decision I think I've probably ever made on something that scale. And he was like, if you don't like it, we can just repaint it. Like you're not stuck with this, right? Like that all or nothing perfectionist thinking can really cloud our judgment. It did for me. So I picked a paint color that I liked. It's like this.
blueishy green tone. I wish I remembered the name of the paint, because I usually pick my nail polish off of the names. I love paint names. so we went back to the house. He took everything out of my office. We didn't have for the day. It was literally a Sunday. So he's like, I'll do, I'll paint, and you can step back from it. And I was like, my goodness, you're the best.
So it took longer than he thought, which was one of the calculations that I was doing. I was like, I think you might be painting until nighttime. So, that was, you know, it worked out. And then the next day I was able to zoom. The furniture was just pulled back from the walls. I had the window open a little bit for ventilation, but my office was painted in less than 24 hours.
which is mind-blowing to me as someone who overthinks, over plans, sometimes obviously to my detriment, right? So if you're somebody that you're hearing this story and you're like, my gosh, I connect with either people, you connect with me, like somebody who needs to have a solid plan to the point that sometimes I don't take action or my partner.
who can be like, let's do it today and do the bare minimum planning that's necessary and make it work. So if you connect with either of us, this episode is for you for sure. I know I'm talking about this idea that it's okay to not plan and it's good to not plan sometimes. And so that might be setting off alarms in your brain in either direction. Like if you're somebody like me where you're like, Sarah, I cannot imagine not planning.
or there's no way I would ever decide to paint my office in the moment. I want you to challenge some of your thinking and look for maybe smaller examples of where going with the flow might be helpful for you. It does not need to be as big of a project as redesigning a room in your house. Or if you're someone like my partner who can very easily go with the flow and sometimes it works out and sometimes
the lack of a plan creates more of a challenge. Again, I wanna like challenge your thinking on that too. Like if you're somebody who you're never planning and it doesn't work for you, maybe this episode is to remind you like, yeah, it's good to skip the plan sometimes and sometimes I need to create a plan. So if you haven't already listened to episode seven, I talk about the power of planning.
And so planning is helpful if you're feeling paralyzed, overwhelmed, or you're aimlessly switching between tasks and checking nothing off your list. It can be beneficial to plan for sure. Go listen to that episode if you want to hear more about how and why to plan.
At the same time, planning can keep you paralyzed. Planning can make you feel overwhelmed. Planning can make it hard to take action, just like me with my office. And there are smaller examples in my life too, but I think that's one that whenever I catch myself feeling stuck with over planning or overthinking, I'm like, can I treat this like my office right now? Can I take some action?
So I'm not saying to never plan. I don't want that to be your takeaway from this episode. I want you to think about planning like the Goldilocks effect, right? It needs to be a mix and match. Sometimes you're doing planning, sometimes you're going with the flow, and it's all about checking in with yourself, checking in on like what's going to make the most impact for you right now. Are you feeling stuck?
And if so, do you need more or less planning? And it's more than just planning, right? Like there's a lot of self-talk that goes into this, right? Like what are you saying to yourself? What systems do you have available to you? Like I know I'm just talking about planning today and planning is a big umbrella of an executive function skill, right? It's organizing your thoughts, it's prioritizing, it's thinking about time management. It's all of those things.
But I want to share with you three signs that you need to stop planning. Not forever, just in the moment. So first, if planning is taking longer than the task itself is going to take, that's a sign that you need to pause planning. And maybe
like step back from it and say, isn't a fit for me right now. I need to come back to this or jump in with some messy action. And so this happened in real time on a coaching call with a client. She was trying to come up with the right time to look up information for an application that she was doing. So she was in the middle of this really complicated administrative task of
compiling information to submit an application. And halfway through the application process, she realized she needed to go log in to an old account to get a form to submit as part of this application. And so when we were talking about it, she's like, okay, so when can I do that? And so she was thinking about her schedule.
How long do I think this will take? And then she was like looking at trying to Tetris it in and her brain went into that perfectionistic mode of I need to find the perfect time to do this. I have where I'll have enough time. I'll have the right energy. It fits my schedule. Maybe I keep working on the application. Maybe I test switch something else, right? Like her brain was like really building this up and she realized in real time with me. my gosh.
I'm spending more time trying to figure this out than logging in and downloading that document is going to take. I'm gonna do it right now. And both her and I had this like aha moment of like, my goodness, you were just over planning right there. Like that your brain thought that it needed to, you know, really map this out. But when she had that aha moment, she literally logged in and downloaded it and it took less than a minute.
And she had been thinking about it for like, you three to five minutes, right? So if you catch yourself and you're like, my gosh, this is taking so much time to think through a plan, that's a sign to step back from planning. Put up the yield sign or the stop sign, no more planning. Use whatever plan you have, whatever information you have, and jump in and take some messy action, even if it's not the right time or the perfect time, because there is no such thing.
Or if you're like, I can't do it right now, Sarah, that's okay. Just pin it for yourself of like, okay, I have enough of a plan and this is when I can work on it.
So this example beautifully leads me into the second reason that you might need to stop planning. And that is that perfectionism is popping up for you. So definitely perfectionism was part of that first example. If your brain is telling you that you need to have the perfect plan before you can take action, that is a red flag. As someone...
who experiences the perfectionism red flag frequently, just being able to name that for yourself can kind of create that yield sign or that stop sign for yourself. Like, no, I'm letting my perfectionistic part of my brain activate right now and take over. So again, if your brain is saying, I need to have all of the information before I can get started, check in, check in with yourself.
Can you get part of the information and then start taking action and then continue to collect information as part of your process? Most of the time, I'm guessing you can. Most of the time, we don't need 100 % of everything before we take some action. And I'm not saying like, go do the whole thing without the information, but like you can get out of the planning mode and into action mode and then be doing both.
simultaneously. You can be doing planning while you're taking action. It doesn't have to be perfect because it won't be perfect.
And this is a conversation that came up with a different client where we were making a plan for something and thinking through, how long will this take? What are some possible challenges that might pop up? What information do you need to gather? Who do you need to talk to? And she asked this question that really stuck with me. She said, is...
this executive functioning or is this perfectionism? And so what she meant by that was that we were going through all of this planning and, you know, making sure that she felt comfortable with the plan. And that is executive functioning, right? Like thinking about time, thinking about the materials you need, thinking about all of those things. That's executive functioning. Thinking about your emotions, emotional regulation, that's executive functioning.
But what she meant by the question of is this executive functioning or is this perfectionism was, is the level that I'm trying to plan actually perfectionism? Does that, I hope that makes sense. In our conversation, it made total sense. But basically she was like, I feel like I have enough of a plan that I can start taking action.
But because I'm in my executive function brain and I want to make sure I have systems and I have supports and I have tools, I'm wondering if I'm spending too much time trying to get all the systems just right or create the just right timeline. And that is like teetering over into perfectionism. And so I loved that question because as somebody who loves planning, there can be
you know, as I've talked about in this episode, too much planning. And so are you teetering over into like, this is what I need to get started into, no, this is becoming like, I'm trying to create the perfect plan. So look for those, I'll call them pink flags. They're not quite red flags, but like when you start feeling like, okay, I've done enough planning that I feel good enough to get started. And if you're,
teetering over into like, needs to be a better plan. That's a pink flag that you're heading towards the full red flag of perfectionism holding you back.
The third reason that you might need to stop planning is if you use planning as a quote unquote productive way to avoid the task, also known as procrasta planning. So some of the clients I work with are similar to me in that they love planning. And if this is not you, that's okay. You do not need to love planning. But.
Some people really love the act of planning or they get some dopamine out of the planning process. So rewriting your to-do list so it looks pretty or color coding your brain dump on post-it notes. Feeling like you have some control over this process, Like planning feels good. Again, not everybody has this feeling about planning. So if that's not you, truly it's okay. You do not need to love planning.
I'm not saying don't color code or don't rewrite your list because those can be really helpful strategies. But if you find that you're putting a lot of time and energy into this planning process, that might be a little pink flag that you're basically staying in your comfort zone and that
because planning feels comfortable, it gives you a sense of dopamine that your brain gets this like little check mark of like, I made progress towards the thing, even if you don't take action on it. And I think it's important to acknowledge, like this is that planning can be an important part, but we wanna make sure that you're then stepping into action mode on your pretty plan. Whether that's your sticky notes, your planner,
your, the calendar that you've curated for yourself, right? Like I want to make sure that you can step into the discomfort of taking action. And sometimes it's acknowledging like, okay, I've done the part that's comfortable for me. I've created my plan. Now I'm going to let myself experience a little bit of discomfort and take action on it.
And so this is something that's come up in my coaching membership, Stuck to Started, this idea of a member saying, if I don't have the energy to do the thing, I plan instead because it feels like I'm making progress. It feels good to write things down, but I just don't have the energy to take action. And so that's valid for lots of reasons.
Planning does take a lot of cognitive energy. It is a huge executive functioning task to plan. It's also if you're somebody who has physical health challenges, chronic health challenges, mental health challenges, planning is draining. And so I wanna validate that for you. So checking in with yourself of what do you have the energy for? Or how can you set yourself up to take action
even if it isn't right now when you're in your planning mode. So it doesn't have to be, I don't want it to sound like this toxic productivity, like just do it. That's not what I'm saying. But part of your planning process can be, okay, I'm gonna plan with my energy and so I'm gonna create a plan that has low energy options or creative energy options or...
low physical energy, but high social energy options. So then when you're checking in with your energy, you can say, okay, right now, I'm having some high problem solving energy, let me go to my list that I've made. And I can pick something from the list that works for me. So you're allowed to plan for your energy and you're allowed to like have a menu of options that you're choosing from, you don't always have to do the exact thing that you're planning for.
So I want to wrap up this episode with a checking question for yourself. This is something that you can ask anytime when you catch yourself thinking about doing a task or thinking about doing some planning, or you have that like thought in your head going of, what could I do right now? Here's the question. How much planning is helpful here for me?
planning keeping you stuck? Is planning helping you move forward? And then remind yourself of the Goldilocks effect, right? You want to make sure that you're allowing your planning to be flexible based on your mood, your energy, the situation, the task or the goal that's on your radar.
I hope you give yourself permission after listening to this episode that it's okay to not plan sometimes or to let your planning process look different. And if you're looking for additional support, finding that Goldilocks effect of how much planning is helpful, how much is going with the flow helpful, what tools and resources help you plan, help you take action. This is exactly what we talk about literally every week.
in Stuck2Started. So not only do we have a co-working time, which is a designated time to plan and take action. That's something that I guide members through the first 10 minutes. I ask them to share what action items are on their plate. And then I provide some coaching to help them create a plan for those things if they're feeling stuck or systems and tools to try to break things down.
or to task switch, right? And I'll do more episodes on task switching. I know that's been a highly requested topic. But then at the end of the coworking session, we take some time to reflect what went well, what do you want to keep doing, what was challenging, what do you need to adjust so that they can keep going on with their work for the day or take the tools and systems that were helpful for them and use them another time they're feeling stuck.
We also have a monthly reflection workshop where I have guided questions, journal questions that help you reflect on exactly those same questions that I was talking about earlier. What goals are you working on? What does the plan look like? What are you finding helpful? What are you finding challenges, noticing patterns? And members have found it super helpful because we do this every single month.
They're able to look back on what goals or plans did I put in place? What do I need to shift like this month to month planning with flexibility? It's not a rigid plan. It's not rigid goal setting. It's basically an opportunity to reflect on what's working and what's not working. So if you're curious about joining the membership, there is a link in my show notes.
But if you have questions, shoot me an email and we can chat about it and make sure that the membership is a good fit for you. So thank you so much for being here, listening to this episode today about the joys and challenges of planning and not planning and finding the Goldilocks effect, letting yourself go with the flow sometimes if that's a challenge for you. If you're somebody who wants to practice more planning,
go back and listen to episode seven, where I talk about the benefits of planning, the strategies that you can use to plan and all that good stuff. So thank you so much for being here. Happy planning, and happy going with the flow. Take care.
