No Plan Survives…

Helmuth von Moltke, a nineteenth century German Field Marshall once said, “no plan survives contact with the enemy.” His point being that the act of executing a plan has immediate and often profound effects upon the assumptions upon which the plan was founded. Hence, to achieve the originally intended results, the plan must be continuously amended to account for the shifting state of affairs.

That about sums up the last several weeks of my life. It seems that every carefully laid plan that I have undertaken in the past several weeks has blown up in my face in fairly short order. For instance, I thought I had made a good plan for writing my book. I had a rough outline down and a plan for when and how I was going to write it.

As for when, I planned to sit down each evening at nine o’clock and spend an hour or so working on the book. I figured that I would split the time approximately equally between developing the example code and actually writing the body of the text.

Then I started my exercise program. The plan there is to average 13,000 steps per day for six weeks. The carrot at the end of that stick is a $100 Amazon gift card from my employer if I manage to do it. So far, I have managed to do it. I have come close to not meeting my daily goal several times. I found myself walking around at 11:45 finishing up my steps on more than one occasion.

Usually, I get a walk in after work and the rest of my evening is free. The problem then is, that when I do sit down to write, I am often so tired that I can barely keep my eyes open. So, I end up going to bed without getting any writing done.

What is worse, when I do manage to work on the book, I realize that I am going about it wrong. I can’t spend a little bit of each session developing example code and a little bit writing about it. I’m going to have to dig in and write the example code first so that I will know what I’m talking about when I do write about it.

Furthermore, my outline is going to have to be severely truncated and I am going to have to adjust my tone to better suit my target audience. The good news here is that the schedule to which I am working is self imposed. I have the flexibility to make these decisions. That is part of what I enjoy about working on a project without a boss.

These examples may seem trivial but they represent only the tip of the iceberg. Every aspect of my life lately, from work to hobby, from interpersonal relationships to my social life, such as it is, is experiencing the same sort of upheaval. I feel like I’m living the Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.”