Overplanning 101
Does one really need a crash course on how to overplan? I mean, maybe not. But, are some ways to do it that are more productive than others, for sure. And I’ve done them all, so now I’ll WRITE about them all, and we can all argue about the best way to be absolutely manic about planning something!
Obviously, the key to overplanning is to embrace rabbit holes and obsession; but also, the real Step 1: prioritize. What is the most critical thing to really get nailed down NOW? What can wait till departure is a little closer?
The way to…..NOT do it is perhaps the way I’ve done it all day today (were this an introductory college course, I’d be failing) which is to just have too many damn balls in the air and be absolutely incapable of focusing on any one thing. I want to plan a lot of things right now - three of my own trips (Bend, which I want to be my first official destination blog, New Zealand [squeeee], and a newly-booked Dolomites itinerary [SQUEEEEEE]), one for my parents (Key West, which looks absolutely freaking delightful) - but I also need to redesign this website, and I also need to….you know….work. Really inconvenient. (Also there are kids roaming around here somewhere - hopefully my husband is parenting.)
Booking trips based solely on airfare means that a lot of the time, we’re behind the eight-ball on planning. Yes I got amazing airfare to Italy in August, but that means I’ve done no planning. I get started and, huh, turns out, for a lot of people this is the trip of a lifetime, and those refugios are booked up a year in advance. So although Bend is in two weeks, and NZ is in two months, I actually need to prioritize Italy for a bit.
The way to manage this stress (LET ME OVERPLAN) and (OH GOD I’M TOTALLY SLACKING IN ALL THESE OTHER AREAS OF LIFE), for me, is to prioritize. We need to figure out where we’re going to stay in Italy, and get accommodation booked like now-now. We can’t do that until we’ve figured out what our must-do hikes are. So, ok. Step 1: identify must-do hikes, then map them, then start reaching out to refugios and checking availability. I’ll aim to have this done by the end of the week both so that we can maybe get lucky and snag a few final openings, but also, so I don’t drive myself and everyone around me absolutely insane freaking out about this. If I can get this one piece done, most of the rest of it can wait, and falls into the ‘fun’ bucket of trip planning.
So yes, I will spend a total of like ten hours hunched over my laptop, obsessively researching the most epic hikes in the Dolomites, adding them to a newly made “Dolomites Must Do Hikes” Google map list, stalking satellite images, reading every blog post imaginable - BUT, at the end of it, I will have a route that will enable me to nail down where we want to stay, so I can start getting those booked. (Or, trying to.) I will also have made a pretty decent list of things I do NOT want to worry about doing. I will have moved forward on the gating factor, saved other stuff for taking more time with later, and TA DA! Will have the last remaining rooms in the refugios I want booked. Tension headache totally worth it.
