Failing To Plan Indeed Is Planning To Fail.

I used to think planning was a virtue. A kind of secular holiness. I was convinced that if I just found the perfect structure—the one mythical app, the flawless spreadsheet—I’d finally unlock the version of myself I kept imagining. This other self was always just out of reach. Focused. Effective. Unstoppable. Probably woke up at 5 AM without an alarm.

He looked a lot like those productivity gurus on YouTube, the ones with lives edited down to a seamless sunrise montage. All algorithmic efficiency and tidy calendars, with body-fat percentages so low they probably glisten when they breathe. I wanted that clinical perfection. I figured the only thing separating me from that guy was the right Gantt chart.

This obsession became a spiral. The planning became the project. I wasn't studying medicine; I was studying how to study medicine. I’d spend entire evenings designing a system, color-coding tabs, researching note-taking philosophies, and admiring the digital architecture of my own theoretical success. It felt productive. My screen was tidy. My folders were nested.

But the deeper I spiraled into the blueprint, the less I actually moved. It was just a form of procrastination dressed in a lab coat.

One Saturday, the familiar itch returned. I was feeling it. Wired. Extra motivated. Coffee was hot, keyboard was clicking, and I was whispering the same old lie to myself: this is it. This is the week I finally get my life together. No, really. This time.

So I built a masterpiece. A spreadsheet so intricate it could have hung in a gallery. It had conditional formatting. Dropdown menus for "Status." Columns for "Priority." Every hour from Monday to Friday was accounted for. A work of art. Monday, 9 AM: Hypertension. 11 AM: Ischaemic Heart Disease. 2 PM: Review.

Each cell was a tiny, perfect, color-coded monument to my ideal self.

But Monday came. 9 AM. The spreadsheet was open, glowing and expectant.

My brain, which loves the idea of structure but chews up any attempt to live inside it, had other plans. It didn't want the straight line I’d drawn. It looked at "Hypertension" and immediately wanted to know about a new video editing technique. It wanted to loop, to jolt, to ricochet. Within ten minutes, I wasn't reading about beta-blockers; I was deep in a DaVinci Resolve rabbit hole, convincing myself this, too, was "productivity."

I barely got through a snot-sized chunk of Hypertension before the 11 AM deadline hit, filling me with that familiar wave of failure.

Heart Disease got bumped to Tuesday. A problem for "Future Me." Of course, Tuesday's carefully stacked schedule couldn't handle the extra weight. I didn't touch it. Asthma? Ghosted. Diabetes? A no-show.

By Friday, the plan wasn’t just unraveling. It had dissolved into a sticky, useless mush of guilt. I didn’t just miss a few tasks. I missed the entire point. The whole week felt like wading through thick, cold soup with no spoon. I looked at the abandoned schedule like it had betrayed me. But I knew the truth. I was the one who turned it into a shrine instead of a tool. And you don't use a shrine; you just kneel in front of it and feel bad about yourself.

Planning is seductive. It feels exactly like progress. You map out your future in high resolution, and your brain gives you the same dopamine hit as if you’d actually done the work. You feel in control. It's the same hit you get from buying new running shoes instead of going for a run.

But it’s not the work. It’s a decoy. A proxy. It’s a comfortable, well-lit, climate-controlled waiting room where you can sit and pretend you're about to be called in. A trick I kept falling for. Again, and again.

All those shiny blueprints—the time blocks, the SMART goals, the "Eat the Frog" B.S.—all crumbled under one simple, terrifying truth: I never know what matters most until I’m already drowning. By the time I figure it out, the beautiful map is for a city I'm not even in anymore.

Then, last week, I hit one of those gaps. A real one. Not a "missed-a-task" gap, but a "oh-my-god-I-know-nothing" gap.

Acute Coronary Syndrome.

I knew the words. I could have passed a multiple-choice-question test on them. But I didn't know the picture. Not the feel of it. The abstract knowledge suddenly felt hollow. How would they present? A real person, in a real room. Chest pain, sure. But thenwhat? Radiation? Diaphoresis? Risk factors? How do you tell the difference between a STEMI, NSTEMI, unstable angina, stable angina? Not on a chart, but in a person? What do you see on an ECG? What do you do?

I didn't know. Not in a way that mattered.

So I started digging. There was no outline. No study clock shaming me. Just the panic and the need. I just pulled threads. I fell into textbooks, guidelines, YouTube videos, asked friends. It was messy. It was 1 AM. Some threads broke. Some led deeper. Every new answer just raised another, better question.

I circled back, obsessively. What actually defines a STEMI on an ECG? Is any ST elevation enough? Obviously not. There’s nuance. Always nuance.

And the more I read, the clearer it got. Slowly. Sharply. Not a clean, sterile light. It was like mist pulling away from a coastline, revealing the land bit by bit.

It hit me right there, buried in ECG readouts, blue light painting my face. That messy, aimless, panic-driven curiosity was doing more than any perfect plan ever did.

That kind of study doesn’t feel like study. It feels like survival practice. It's prepping your mind not for a test, but for an emergency. It's the difference between memorizing a script and learning how to improvise.

And that clarity? It came from a question. A real one.

For once, I wasn’t thinking like a student trying to pass. I was thinking like a doctor trying to prepare. The student's goal is to get an 'A'. The doctor's goal is to not let someone die. The stakes are different. I was finally preparing for the real thing. A ward. A clinic. A panicked moment with no script.

I wasn't just stuffing facts into a leaky brain. I was forming something usable. Something alive. Not a checklist. A reflex.

So no, I’m not blocking out two hours tomorrow night for ECGs. That old game of slotting diseases into neat little days? It’s over. I know how that ends. Beautiful plan, chaotic brain, weekly implosion. I’ve lived that loop too many times, and I’m done pretending it’ll go differently next time.

Instead, I’ll wake up and ask: What do I actually need to know to not fuck this up? What knowledge would make me more useful, more steady, more human in the moment? What single thing, if I didnt know it, would make me ashamed to face a patient with my name tag on?

It’s a small shift. But it changed everything.

The plan is to do. Let the doing show me the plan. Let the panic become clarity. Let the gaps become doors. I don't feel like I'm constantly failing my own system anymore. I'm not perfect. Not consistent. But I finally feel like I’m walking in the same direction as the version of me I keep trying to reach. That relentless self-blame? It's quieter now.

The fog doesn't clear because you have a map. The fog thins out, just a little, with every step you take into it. And if I have to choose between a perfect plan for a city I'm not in, and an imperfect, messy presence in the fog... I know exactly what I’m choosing.