Planning
Plans don't survive first contact.
Failing to plan is planning to fail.
So... damned if you do, but damned if you don't?
Definitely not!
The time you take to outline a plan creates new neuron pathways for your brain. You give the brain a good workout and are in mentally better shape for having flexed your grey matter.
Having spent that time and space exploring options also leaves you with a little bit more clarity than you would otherwise have--what is it you're trying to do, and how? When you plan, you outline a scenario with and endstate. You compare and contrast your goals, options, and outcomes, and begin to “bin” these combinations pretty quickly. Later, if or when you find yourself facing a related problem, you’ve already thought through parts and pieces to help you get to your answer that much quicker.
Planning doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll have the answer ready, the path from a to b perfectly laid out, but you will have a few drafted plans in your back pocket you can recall rather than start completely from scratch as the unexpected happens.
We’re currently working on our plan for our homestead. This is our grand master plan, according to us. This behemoth includes our plan to financial independence, our syllabus, so to speak, of all the homesteading skills we want to learn, our bucket list items, and our homestead plan. These plans are interrelated and man is it overwhelming to outline. But so exciting!!
For example: 'I want to know ways of processing and preserving pasta sauce' becomes... Is it better to prepare per meal or make a large batch of sauce and preserve that? How much sauce do we eat in a year? How many tomatoes do we need to grow that sauce? And what kinds of tomatoes? On how much land? And in what USDA growing zone, and through which months? Is this going to be a multi-week harvest/preservation period so that we need to rule out traveling during this window? Sun dried tomato sauce? With the peels or just the juices? Hand milled, or machine?
Yep. All that planning just for pasta sauce. We used to buy a few $1 cans of Hunts when they’re on sale at the store, but we're trying to buy more in glass jars (to avoid potential coatings from interacting with our food), running us about $3 a jar.
But, all those tomato sauce questions help us plan. The answers to those questions help us narrow down our path, outline our wants and needs, and enable us to have a long-view with food costs. $3 a jar, probably at least 5x per month, is easily $200 a year on just sauce. And we always "doctor" up the basic with more veggies and herbs. But $10 in plants gives me more tomatoes than I generally know what to do with right now. Clearly there’s room for improvement in all of this, but without the planning and math, I'm not sure what optimal is right now for us.
And that’s exactly why we’re planning.
I used to buy paper towels and go through quite a few. Until I did the math. I bought a little flannel and towel material from the fabric store and sewed my own “paper” towels. I found a cute bin to “throw away” the dirty ones until washing day. They’re all white so I bleach them clean no matter the mess, and wash and fold and reuse. They’re also Clorox wipes, bacon grease catchers, make up removers (although I made those smaller to make sure I wasn’t rubbing grime and grease into my face if the didn't wash 100% clean!), and all sorts of generic mess sopper-uppers. I made these years ago, in addition to buying a bundle at a big box store, and I have yet to throw out or mend the hand-made version... but have definitely had to mend or chuck the box store versions.
We pay a lot for convenience and right now, we’re working on trying to plan out how to use our finances deliberately, over the long haul, to get to our homestead and enjoy meals we source from our slice of heaven. This truly sounds magical.
We're just in the throws of planning how to get there!
What are you planning for? Is this a plan for the week? Decade? A single event? Retirement? Do you have an annual pasta sauce plan???
