Planning to Plan

How do I stop barrelling in half-cocked? Two weeks ‘off’ and I’ve been planning how to plan: how do I pause before I pounce?

16 August 2025

Fliss Falconer

Not quite off-grid

I turned off my work phone. It was my best attempt to step away from work for two weeks - it didn’t last.

I still checked my emails. I didn't respond to any though. Progress.

I also am attempting to quash the worries that threaten to rise when I consider that my first week back will include a full week of training and planning for the next academic year rather than catching up on emails, so it might as well be three weeks off work. It’s Inset days all over again - necessary meetings, for sure, but itching to get into the classroom and set up for the new term.

And just like every other summer holiday I have ever experienced, I have not managed to get fully away from my work. I am full of ideas on how I can structure, streamline and serve the way I support legal intervention for schools, to benefit pupils, their families, their education institutions and our team.

Less Blood Brothers and Macbeth these days but as much planning for the new term.

Focus: Planning

Lady Macbeth had a couple of hours. We know how that panned out. Her timeframe (rather than her purpose) is my usual remit. Give me a deadline and tell me it's urgent, and I will throw all I can into getting it done.

(For reference, see how my garden has been revamped in the last two weeks knowing that I won't have any time - or inclination - to look at it for the next 9 months or so...).

However, this week's online seminar at the University of Gloucester was focussed on our Continuing Professional Development (CPD), which takes up 500 of our 3000-word count for the first assignment. Taking out academic jargon, it asks how and where we are languishing and how, precisely, we shall shake ourselves of the shortfalls.

I think since my first Professional Development plan, I have always been able to drum up some wording to fit around a half-formed plan I was hatching, as part of the 'undiagnosed but something's there' part of my functioning is thriving on the new and intriguing, and I just love a plan. I just tend to execute half-cocked and wing it.

Looking into room 17 of a certain Herefordshire school, you could see the boards and posters I lovingly attached long after I left the place. In the next couple of months, I will be having a nose to see what remains, as I take my eldest to look around it as a potential student...

The planning of those walls took months. A mix of maternity leave, department renovation and an unexpected flood (not caused by me!), I wrote out lists on Notes and Excel, which I still have today, on what I wanted to put on my walls. I wanted to do it once and for it to last. It was probably the last time I really worked on a plan before putting it into action. I had to exercise patience before I could get my hands on my room. And it hurt. It felt like a physical ache to wait.

Delayed gratification: I hate it.

It didn't hurt nearly half as much to leave it all when I left teaching. I was happy that I was leaving behind a pleasant room that could be modified to suit the next person (although I am sorry for the residual sticky marks from my decorative tape on the white board and the final books I couldn't rehome!) but leaving a project does not feel as heart-wrenching as waiting to start putting a plan into action. (Diagnosis unnecessary.)

Where do I start?

So, how precisely am I going to work on this?

Well, my plans do not just affect me, do they?

My long-suffering partner often finds himself lost in the ever-evolving kitchen layout - my latest ‘improvement’ project. Worse for him, as his diagnosed Autism needs stability and regularity so he suffers more than he should.

And my argument of 'well, I am wanting it and I am doing it and I don't need your help or your opinions' is admittedly selfish and juvenile.

Whether I know (let's be honest, think) it will make our lives function for the better, my decisions for the home do affect at least the eight beings under this roof, if not the twelve that are our 'village' and the others who are our 'extended village'. I am humoured most days, especially when we can create a moment for the Strawbridge's 'I've been thinking' by Angel and Dick's eye-roll to the camera.

I know I am supported. Again, please reference my eighty-year-old neighbour who helped me move a panel of a Wendy House yesterday, and the seventy-something-year-old neighbour who made me stop and drink a pint of lime cordial before I collapsed.

So, I know I impact others and oftentimes, not in the ways I intended.

Therefore, I am planning and scaling down my next work plan ahead of attempting its execution. I swear, it's progress.

The planning process

I have a notebook, and a pen. Already, I am slowing down the process. I have watched a Youtube video for a second time, but I have not opened the work laptop, meaning that I cannot plan for work projects until work time.

(Yes, I am still on this laptop and yes, this is about work and Uni but bear with me. Progress takes time and it means changing my modus operandi of 15-plus-years.)

Most crucially, I have set out a plan. Then I have asked myself questions about it. I am critically thinking about it.

I want to get 'here'. To get 'here'..

• How am I going to do it?

• How do I look at those areas?

• Why is that important?

• Is that something for now?

• What needs to happen first?

• Is this something I am going to manage to do?

• Will I be able to gather that information myself or will I need to ask other people?

• Will that be available to inform this?

• Does that need to be made public now or can it wait until later?

• Can I share it with just the team for now?

• What about pulling it back so it's useful for my Lead first then scale it up later?

• What am I doing now that would help?

• What tweaks does it need first?

All these are based on the ten-minute planning session I did earlier. I exorcised my need to get my 'posh'* pen out and get something on my French-lined exercise book. I then put those instruments down and picked up my laptop. I can think about the scaled-down version before I begin working on it in earnest, in ten days' time... or more.

I am reeling. It is a plan. And there is time for honing, development and consideration. It will take in how it will impact others and how it can be initiated, maintained and developed... later.

Is this progress? Real progress?

How much it will last, we shall see. Perhaps that's part of the progress, too? I should not expect an immediate transformation. My goodness, that's it. The change will take planning, too.

Perhaps, for my final two days of my holiday, I will be able to 'sit and chill'...

That fireplace won't paint itself, though...

I’ll have a cup of tea and think about it first.

*P.S. My tutor thought my pen 'posh'; I love it because it's pink.