Hi, I'm Kai...and I have a planning problem

Doesn't this sound familiar?

Here I am, freshly returned from a writers’ retreat that nearly ended far worse than it actually did. I got one of the books mostly edited, so I’m sitting at about 650 more pages to do (yeah, that was an experiment in failure, and that sucked), but the biggest thing I learned last week was that not only do I not like editing in large bursts, but I’m also not overly fond of planning.

It’s weird when you think about it though. I’ve always managed, one way or another, to get everything I wanted to do, done. This year though…gotta be honest, I’ve got so much to do, and I’m not sure I’ve got the time to do it. The garden is an overgrown disaster area, I’ve barely started decluttering the house, and honestly? The sooner I get books up, the happier I’ll be.

And most of it is decision paralysis. I keep deciding to do one thing, feel guilty I’m not doing another and then looping around and around and around until I’ve done bits of all of it, and achieved absolutely nothing. Or practically anyway - there’s a tidied corner here, a pile of laundry there, a corner that gets filled up again here, a half written chapter there, coding here that needs debugged, and deadlines scattered like caltrops. Cause you know, you wake up and it’s like standing on lego when you realise you’ve got something on.

So. I’ve been reluctantly trying out apps that claim to use ‘AI’ to help schedule stuff. I keep bouncing back to Motion, but next month, I’m going to be trying three of them alongside one another, along with what my time blocks in my diary actually say and see where that leaves me.

The three I’ve settled on are Motion, Trevor and Reclaim.ai - results will be discussed at the end of the week, and will be in public, for the most part. I’ll talk about what I’m up to, and how it’s all scheduled, and to make it entirely fair, I’m going to….gulp….reset Motion. All of them starting with the same data in other words.

Beyond that, I know it’s a Bank Holiday in the UK and Memorial Day in the US, so I thought I’d just touch base quickly, then leave everyone to their days.

If you’ve got experience with any of the systems I’m looking at comparing and want to add anything that you think is important to the testing, please let me know. :)