It seems common that when making plans, we tend to overestimate how much time we have, what kind of resources, both from ourselves and from the environment, we can get, and what we can do finally. We believe we have quite enough time, much more resources available than needed and we can achieve much more than our plan. But when we finally get started per the plan, things are different. We often find ourselves lack of time to finish the small tasks for some bigger actions, miss the deadlines, and struggle to get necessary resources to complete we need to do.
When facing such problems, my previous choice would be to lower the expectation until I feel comfortable with each small task and I don’t need to worry about the time and resources needed for me to finish them, meaning it’s quite lower than my capacity level and is not challenging any more. Then it becomes boring and make me wondering if I am wasting time on such things. And then I might try something bigger and bigger until I see myself in the same situation where I struggle for time and resources for everything I need to complete…Such a weird cycle! Maybe there are some books, lessons, studies on such things, like I was quite bothered by bad communication and not knowing how to react in tough situations (challenged or blamed by others without any reason, working with difficult people, etc.), but then realized it’s something common to human beings and quite a lot of people are bothered by them as well. There are some studies on these things and some lessons and skills are quite helpful for us to handle such things better.
What I am thinking now is we don’t need to lower our expectation to under our capacity level because there’s no point to do so. We should be challenged because that’s one of the most efficient ways to improve ourselves, but we don’t need to treat the results too seriously. The expectation we set for ourselves is something like a practice bar and it’s supposed to be higher than our reach because only so can we practice our jumping to try to reach it and with this kind of practice we can jump higher and higher until we can reach the bar but then that will be when we need to put the bar higher again. This is the way things should work when it comes to plans and steps we set for ourselves when we want something. It should not like we set up a goal, we go for it and then we get it, without any failure. Failures do not necessarily bring about successes, but being always successful does not mean better than facing failures now and then or even always. The main things is what lead to our success or failure, or what our success or failure bring about to us.