Principle · chapter 06, Planning
Plan for the person you will be on Wednesday evening
A plan built for a person with no tiredness, no other people’s urgencies and no sick child becomes the measure against which you (the person with all of that) come off badly. That is the quiet cost of most planning: not that it fails, but that every week ends with evidence against yourself.
A plan is not control over reality but a decision about where your energy goes, and you have exactly as much of it as you have. A plan describes capacity, not ambition: not how much you would like to do, but how much fits into a week in which something goes wrong. And something does, every week.
The buffer is part of the plan. An unwritten buffer does not exist; it will be taken. A plan that requires a different person in order to be carried out is not ambitious. It is untrue, and you cannot work well from untrue documents.
Try this for one week
Next Sunday, lay out the week as usual, then deliberately remove twenty per cent and leave the space empty. Mark two hours a day that belong to you, one day without other people’s deadlines, and one deep move with a specific hour and a written first step.
What this does not promise
The fifth is a starting proposal, not a threshold. This does not create more time; there is exactly as much as there was. It only changes what you do with it.
From Modern Hermet, chapter 06: Planning. The book reads the real Hermetic texts with their dates, and offers twelve practices for an ordinary week.
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