Does anyone really enjoying planning to do a thing more than doing the actual thing? If you do, according to Nawijn et al., that’s the case with other people as well. In their study published in the journal “Applied Research in Quality of Life,” Nawijn et al. implies that vacationers are happier in the anticipatory period before their trip, compared to the time period right after they finish their trip. The researchers inferred that this is because vacationers have a positive experience to look forward to. So, when you’re planning (or looking forward to) an experience, you’ll get more enjoyment out of that than right after that experience happens.
Personally, I’m the same way, especially when it comes to projects. I really enjoy the “planning” aspect of projects, where I dream about how much fun I’m going to have during the creation of the project and imagining what I’m going to accomplish by finishing the project. But when it comes to the actual “doing” of the project, I majorly hem and haw, procrastinate, and wonder why I am the way I am until I force myself to concentrate on the task at hand.
For example, when I was deciding on what project to work on for my CS 467: Capstone class, the idea of creating a Text-based Adventure Game really appealed to me, and I immediately wrote that down as my first choice in the survey for the class. I felt like it would be so cool to develop an adventure game with a natural language parser, and to get more experience melding creativity with programming. I envisioned creating a game that took place in a dank, musty dungeon where you would befriend a friendly ASCII skeleton who would help you solve puzzles. Not to mention, it wouldn’t hurt to add this project onto my resume, and proudly declare how I created a natural language parser.
However, now that I’m in the midst of actually starting to develop this project, I find that I’m encountering a couple of problems. Number 1: I don’t know what a natural language parser is, and haven’t the foggiest idea how to grasp the concept of actually creating one. Number 2: This project has a lot of moving parts, and I feel overwhelmed with everything that needs to be done to fulfill the project’s requirements. The notion that I have to actually create this project is really daunting (a bit of sarcasm on this sentence, just to clarify 💀).
Luckily, there is something that can be done to solve these problems– More planning! It seems counterintuitive to plan more instead of do more, but hear me out. At this stage of planning, you would want to break down your problems into actual “plans” (harhar) of action. To illustrate, take problem Number 1 into consideration. Instead of continuing to be frustrated and confused as to where I should even begin, I can organize my thoughts to tackle the situation at hand by researching how to implement a natural language parser and drafting out how I’m going to do this week by week. Now let’s look at Number 2. Because I am working in a group and for our Project Plan, we divided up the duties and requirements for the projects so not one person takes on too much responsibility at once.
In conclusion, planning is a lot of fun! However, planning is coupled with the actual doing of what you were planning for, which can be daunting. To combat this, one method of reducing frustration and working through procrastination is to plan even more, by identifying the problem at hand and then planning out how to find the solution.
References
- Nawijn, J., Marchand, M. A., Veenhoven, R., & Vingerhoets, A. J. (2010, March). Vacationers Happier, but Most not Happier After a Holiday. Retrieved January 17, 2022, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2837207/
