8 Ways to Stop Planning and Start Getting Things Done Today!

I've made a career out of jumping into things before I fully knew what I was doing: a receptionist job I almost talked myself out of, a QA role that turned into building documentation from scratch, a business built one imperfect blog post at a time. None of it started with a finished plan. It all started because I decided the plan could catch up later.

If you're the kind of person who researches, color-codes, and maps out every possible outcome before taking a single step, you already know how easy it is to mistake planning for progress. Learning how to stop planning and start getting things done isn't about abandoning structure altogether. It's about noticing the exact moment planning stops helping and starts becoming the thing standing between you and the work.

These are eight ways I've actually pulled that off, pulled from a wireframe deadline, a meal prep system, a career jump I nearly didn't take, and a handful of other real moments where overthinking almost won. Here's what worked and what you can take from it.

1. Stop Thinking and Start Doing

When I started this website and my travel site before it, I didn't really know what I was doing yet. I just wanted to help people, so I started writing from my own experience because that's all I had to work with.

The first version of this site was just a pretty shell for a while. Good design, nothing written. My actual first post here came from being sick of every job I'd ever had that ran without real systems, without documentation, without people communicating with each other. I was rebuilding my own business at the time, in a “no way in hell is that happening to me again” mood, and I just laid out what I'd learned so somebody else could start from a better place than I did.

My first post on the travel site was rawer still, basically a diary entry about why I was traveling that year. I hit publish without thinking twice. Here goes nothing.

If I'd ruminated the way I catch myself doing now, I never would have posted either one. I didn't know what SEO was. I didn't know how to write, so it didn't read like a college essay. I had the creative writing chops from years of poetry and music, but not copywriting instincts. Being a little green actually helped. I built, revised, and tested as I went instead of waiting until I had it figured out, and that's still mostly how I work.

A small act can start a snowball effect that feels impossible to stop.

Start With the Smallest Version of the Task

You don't need a finished plan to start. You need one thing you can do today that moves you an inch closer, even if it's messy, even if you don't fully know what you're doing yet. The plan can catch up later, and it usually gets clearer once you're actually moving instead of sitting still trying to map out every step in advance.

If you're stuck deciding what that one thing should be, pick the smallest version of the task that still counts as progress. Send the rough draft instead of the polished one. Publish the post that's good enough instead of the one you're still tweaking in your head. Momentum teaches you things that planning never will.

A useful test: ask what the smallest thing is that would still let someone else react to it. A feedback comment, a client's reply, a reader's response, real reactions tell you more in a day than another week of solo planning ever will. If the task you're stuck on is too big to define a smallest version, that's usually a sign it's actually several tasks pretending to be one, and the real first step is just breaking it apart.

2. Prioritize Action Over Perfectionism

The first time I was handed a wireframing task, I had no idea what I was doing. I was doing QA at a startup at the time, and one day the wireframes landed on my desk. I had one initial meeting to get the requirements, one week to deliver something, and zero background in UI/UX.

I froze. It felt less like an assignment and more like a skill assessment, and that made me decide I couldn't ask any more questions, not to my boss and definitely not to the engineers. I was one of only two women in the office, and the only one anywhere near engineering, in a company too small to even have a separate QA department. Asking for help felt like the last thing I could afford to do.

The last person in that role had used a PowerPoint slide deck to build wireframes, so that's what got handed to me. I was so green I didn't even know there was actual software built specifically for this.

I studied that deck. I didn't trust my own instincts, so I went down a rabbit hole instead, researching everything UI/UX-related: terminology, symbols, the works, before I'd even opened the document.

Thank goodness for Parkinson's Law, because without that one-week deadline, I probably would have researched forever. At some point, I snapped myself out of it and gave myself one hour. Just one hour to research, then I had to start building. About halfway through that hour, I remember thinking, is that it? It can't be that easy. I kept second-guessing myself the whole way through, half-convinced I was somehow representing more than just myself in that room.

I delivered the first draft and was told I'd basically redesigned the damn thing. It was good enough that it barely needed revisions, and it was detailed enough that the wireframes themselves doubled as documentation, something nobody had asked for but that made the handoff to engineering a lot smoother. I'd gone above and beyond and didn't even realize it in the moment.

Give Yourself a Deadline You Can't Talk Your Way Out Of

Research and prep will expand to fill whatever time you give them. If you don't set a limit on it yourself, perfectionism will happily use it all and call it diligence. Set an artificial cutoff, even a short one, and treat crossing it as non-negotiable.

The cutoff doesn't have to be long to work. Mine was one hour, and it was enough because the constraint forced a decision instead of another lap of research. You'll rarely regret starting too early. You will regret the version of the project that only exists in your head because you never let yourself finish researching it, and you'll never actually know if your instincts were right if you never let them make a decision.

Make the deadline harder to quietly extend by telling someone else what it is, even if it's just a coworker, a friend, or a note in your own calendar with a specific time instead of a vague “today.” A deadline only you know about is easy to renegotiate with yourself. One that's visible, even to one other person, adds just enough friction to actually stick.

3. Get Rid of Roadblocks

I went back to that same startup for a second stint, doing QA again. Within a week, I'd mapped out most of the deficiencies, not just in my own department, but in design and engineering across two countries. Within a month, I was promoted to QA lead, which sounded great until I realized what it actually meant: there was no documentation, no testing plan, and nothing left behind by the person who'd had the role before me. Testing had been happening on vibes.

I had no team to speak of, just me and one other tester, and nothing to build from. So I started from zero: researched what a testing plan even was, bought a book I still reference today, and built a real process where there hadn't been one. That solved my own corner of the problem.

It didn't touch the real roadblock, though, which was everyone else. Other departments weren't responding to my tickets, and engineering was disorganized enough that I ended up writing them their own sanity-check checklist, too, just so builds wouldn't ship with the same bugs reintroduced over and over. At some point, I was documenting other people's process gaps as well as my own.

I couldn't force anyone to respond faster or work differently. What I could do was keep documenting, keep the tickets visible, and make the gaps impossible to keep ignoring. Eventually, the rest of the team got in line, not because I strong-armed it, but because the system I'd built made the alternative more annoying than just fixing things.

Work Around What You Can't Control

Not every roadblock is yours to remove. Sometimes the holdup is someone else's response time, someone else's budget, or someone else's priorities, and no amount of hustle on your end changes that directly. What you can control is whether you sit and wait or keep building the parts that don't depend on them.

Start by separating what's actually blocked from what you've just decided is blocked. Usually, only one piece of a project needs someone else's input, and everything else can keep moving. Work on that first.

Make the holdup visible instead of quietly absorbing it. A tracked ticket, a shared doc, a dated request someone can see and ignore only so long: all of that is harder to sit on than a private ask that only you remember making. If nothing moves, follow up on the schedule instead of waiting until you feel frustrated enough to chase it again.

And build the documentation or system nobody else has gotten around to, even if it's not technically your job. It rarely stays “not your job” for long once it's the thing making everyone else's work easier.

4. Do the Hardest Thing First

For me, the task I dread most every single week is meal prep, and if I skip it, I'm royally screwed. My husband and I both work from home with hectic schedules, and skipping meal prep is exactly how junk food becomes the default. Since some health issues came into the picture, that crutch isn't really an option anymore.

I learned my local supermarkets' rhythms during the pandemic, when Instacart was doing my shopping for me: when deals show up, which stores have the best produce, which have the best meat, when to avoid crowds. That knowledge became the backbone of a system. I shop once a week, on Thursday, sometimes a second trip on Friday if I need a third store for something specific. The actual cooking happens on two days: Sunday, to set up the week ahead, and Wednesday, to use up what's left before Thursday's shopping trip resets everything. That's it. Weekend stays protected.

The prep itself is batched by meal. Breakfast usually includes things like oatmeal and burritos made in bulk and frozen, among other rotating options, plus a batch of cold brew, so Monday morning is just pouring coffee over ice. Lunch rotates between leftovers, salads, smoothies, and sandwiches. Dinner gets cooked in quantities that cover at least three days. None of it is complicated. It's just planned.

The real trick is to treat ingredients like building blocks rather than single-use items. If I'm cutting onions, I'm cutting enough for the whole week, not just one meal. The fridge basically has a standing salad bar of prepped components I can grab from instead of starting from scratch every time.

This week, for example, tilapia became both fish sandwiches and ceviche. A pot of pinto beans became breakfast with eggs one day and a side dish the next. One batch of chicken drumsticks got seasoned two different ways, so it didn't feel like eating the same meal twice. Same core ingredients, different combinations, way less decision-making.

When I let this slip, it costs real time and real anxiety, not knowing what to eat, scrambling last minute, making worse choices because I'm tired and didn't plan. The same principle that keeps my content calendar running, building something evergreen and repeatable instead of reinventing it weekly, is exactly what keeps my kitchen running too.

And on the nights I don't feel like eating what I cooked? There's a backup plan for that too. We've got a few go-to places that don't go against our dietary lifestyle, including a specialty supermarket with hot food like rotisserie chicken. Some nights dinner is just grabbing a few things from there and calling it a night.

Ask What Breaks If You Skip It

The hardest task isn't always the biggest one. It's usually the one that, if you skip it, quietly takes the rest of your week down with it. For me, that's meal prep. For you, it might be sending an invoice, prepping for a meeting, or making a phone call you've been avoiding. Find that task by asking what would actually fall apart if this doesn't happen, not what feels most unpleasant to do.

Once you know what it is, build a system around it instead of relying on willpower to remember it every time. Give it a fixed day, a repeatable process, a default you don't have to reinvent under pressure. The goal isn't to make the hard task easy. It's to make it automatic enough that you're not negotiating with yourself about it every single week.

Leave room in the system for the weeks it doesn't go as planned. A system rigid enough to break the first time life gets in the way isn't actually a system. It's just a plan waiting to fail.

5. Focus on the Three Most Important Tasks

Life happens. Shit happens. I can color-code my agenda and have every task neatly organized in ClickUp, and something will still go sideways. That's part of why I stopped time-blocking altogether. A calendar chopped into fifteen-minute segments doesn't leave any room for the version of the day that actually shows up, and I got tired of rebuilding my schedule from scratch every time something knocked it off course.

What replaced it: three tasks a day. Not three tasks total, three that get named first thing in the morning, before the rest of the day's noise has a chance to drown them out. One for work, one personal, one for home. That's the whole system, and it's stayed simple on purpose.

The filter for picking them is what moves the needle. Not everything on a running list does, so the question for each category is what's the single most important thing here, not what's the longest thing or the most urgent-feeling thing.

Work might include starting a workflow update in Dubsado or fixing an email automation issue. Notice “starting.” I don't mark the task as “finished” because I genuinely don't know how long either one will take, and treating it as done in one sitting creates a false deadline I don't need.

Personally, I might finally book a doctor's appointment I've been avoiding, or call my mom. Home might be watering the plants, or finally making the hardware store run for the part that fixes a sliding door that's been sticking for weeks.

If one of the three isn't finished, it doesn't disappear, and it doesn't get stacked underneath two new tasks the next morning either. It carries forward and stays the priority in its category until it's actually done. Only then does something new take its place. I keep the current three written somewhere I'll see them all day, not buried in an app I have to open. When one changes, I rewrite it. Simple as that.

Name Three, Not Twenty

A to-do list with 30 items isn't a priority list. It's an inventory. Naming three forces a real decision about what matters most instead of letting everything sit at equal weight, which is what a long list quietly does no matter how it's sorted.

Split the three across the parts of your life that compete for your attention, not just work. A day that only tracks work tasks lets the personal and home stuff pile up quietly until it becomes its own emergency, usually at the worst possible time.

If a task doesn't get finished, let it carry over instead of guilt-tripping yourself into cramming it in alongside two new ones tomorrow. Piling on is how “three important things” quietly turns back into the thirty-item list you were trying to escape in the first place. The list isn't the goal. Deciding what matters consistently is.

6. Stop making excuses and start taking action (I know, way harsh, Tai).

I don't usually sit in excuses for long. Setbacks tend to be fleeting for me, and I rebound fast, which is one of the things I've actually had going for me over the years. But I can think of two times I nearly talked myself out of something good, and in both cases the underlying excuse was some version of “I'm not qualified for this.”

The first was the jump from restaurant work to an office job, and it wasn't a gentle transition. Picture bouncing between shifts at different Starbucks locations, catering gigs on the side, whatever paid, at a little sandwich shop across the street from where I'd eventually end up working.

The woman who held the receptionist job there was retiring. One day, she walked into the shop, looked at me, and said flat-out that I was too smart to be working there. I genuinely didn't know how to take that at first.

She told me she'd watched how I handled customers, how I thought on my feet, how I could fix a messed-up order and still keep a sunny disposition through the whole exchange. That was her case for me.

She gave me a rundown of the job: answering phones, sorting mail, putting together the office newsletter. She conveniently left out that it was a thirty-line switchboard. She also gave me a deadline, because she needed an answer soon or she'd have to find someone else.

I went home that night and made a mental list of every reason I didn't deserve it. Not enough experience. Not the right background. Who was I to sit at that desk? All of it, even though somewhere underneath the fear, I already knew I was capable of the job. Try imagining that mindfuck for a second: going from making sandwiches for these people to being their coworker, sitting at the front desk of the same building I used to deliver lunch orders to. I went to the interview anyway. I tripled my salary.

The second time was years later, jumping from straight admin work into tech. By then, I'd spent long enough doing nothing but office administration that I'd started to assume that was just the ceiling.

This jump didn't come from a stranger walking into my workplace and calling me out. It came through a connection, someone who knew my work ethic and thought I'd be a fit, which is its own reminder that networking actually pays off in ways you can't always predict up front.

Even with someone vouching for me, the internal excuse showed up right on schedule. I'd never done QA before, and I didn't know what the job actually meant day-to-day beyond the title itself.

Asking “what the hell does QA even involve” felt like disqualifying myself before I'd started. I took the shot anyway. That leap turned into the wireframe deadline, the testing plan built from nothing, and the career I still have. Look at me now.

Notice the Excuse Before You Act on It

The excuse rarely announces itself as an excuse. It shows up dressed as being realistic, humble, or responsible. “I've never done this before” sounds like a fact, not a decision, but it's usually the second one wearing the first one's clothes.

Here's a useful gut check the next time you catch yourself listing reasons you don't deserve an opportunity: ask whether any of those reasons are actually about your ability, or whether they're just fear of finding a socially acceptable outfit to wear. “I don't have enough experience” and “I'm scared this will expose that I'm not good enough” are not the same sentence, even though the first is usually just a nicer way of saying the second.

And if someone who has no real reason to lie to you sees something in you that you can't fully see in yourself yet, take that seriously. Not blindly, but seriously. Outside perspective catches things your own fear is actively working to hide from you, and the people willing to say it out loud are rarer than the opportunities themselves.

7. Find a Support System

My parents were my first support system, my dad especially. He didn't know the first thing about tech, but he bought me my first musical keyboard anyway and, at one point, got me a barely working Commodore 64. The fact that he tried always meant more to me than whether it actually ran.

If you're too young to know what a Commodore 64 was, it was an early home computer that plenty of people, mine included, treated more like a toy than a machine. I got to play Spy vs. Spy on mine a handful of times before it broke for good and quietly became a very expensive paperweight.

I also had a Radio Shack Tandy around the same time, which tells you exactly how long ago this was if you know what that is.

A Tandy, for anyone who's never heard of one: a home computer from the same era that hooked up directly to the TV, complete with its own keyboard and the classic rabbit-ear antennae. Ancient by today's standards, but it was mine.

My dad wanted me to pursue music fully, no hedging. My mom wanted me to get a real job. Having both voices pulling at once helped more than either one alone would have.

He has since passed, but my mom is still one of my biggest supporters. It took her a long time to fully understand what I do for a living, and even now she gives it to me straight instead of telling me what I want to hear.

My friend group works the same way. I'm usually the one cheering everyone else on, but I've got my own cheerleaders too: a friend from elementary school, another from high school, and a few more I picked up along the way. My biggest supporter right now is my husband, whom I've known since third grade. If I so much as start to show doubt about something, he reminds me I'm a badass bitch and means it.

I try to do the same for the people in my corner, because that's the deal with a real support system: it runs in both directions, or it doesn't work at all.

The path I've taken isn't one most people choose. The people closest to me have watched me through every version of it, and instead of judging the parts they didn't understand, they stayed empathetic anyway. I don't take that for granted, and I make sure they know it.

Build the Support System Before You Need It

A support system isn't something you assemble in the moment you're struggling. By then, you're asking strangers, or worse, asking no one. The people who show up when it counts are usually the ones you've already been showing up for.

Start with a short list, not a long one. Name the two or three people you'd actually call if something went sideways today, not the fifty you're friendly with. That short list is who your real support system already is, whether you've treated it that way or not.

Then close the loop in both directions. Tell those people directly what they mean to you instead of assuming they already know, and ask how you can be that same person for them. A support system built on assumptions tends to reveal its gaps at the worst possible time. One built on saying the thing out loud rarely does.

8. Celebrate the Small Wins

This one clicked for me after I made a book trailer for Start Finishing: How to Go from Idea to Done by Charlie Gilkey. I'd been following his work for a while, part of the Productive Flourishing community, downloading his planners, that kind of thing. Volunteering my time on the trailer was an easy yes.

Before the project started, I got an uncorrected proof of the book. One section stuck with me: three ways to celebrate small wins, and why bothering to do it actually matters. Charlie talked about that same idea in person, at a signing at Book Passage in Corte Madera. Hearing it twice is what made it land.

The funny part is I'd already been telling myself, and every friend who'd listen, to “clap for your damn self.” I just wasn't doing it nearly as often as I preached it. Somewhere along the way, I'd decided small wins didn't count for much until there was a big win to justify them. I was completely wrong about that. Now I throw confetti, figuratively, for pretty much everything.

Case in point: this week, one of the apps my husband's been building got approved in the Apple App Store. We're still waiting on Google Play. The old version of me would've said, “Let's wait until both are through,” before we celebrate anything. Instead, we're going out to dinner this 

Decide What Counts as a Win in Advance

Most people don't skip celebrating because they don't have anything worth celebrating. They skip it because they've quietly set the bar at “the whole thing is finished,” and everything before that gets waved off as not enough yet.

Pick your own definition of a win before you're standing in the middle of one, deciding in real time whether it's allowed to count. A single approval out of two. A finished draft, not a published post. A hard conversation you finally had, whether or not it went perfectly. If you wait for the complete, tidy version of success to give yourself permission to celebrate, you'll spend most of your progress not celebrating anything at all.

Conclusion

None of these eight actually require more time, more resources, or more confidence than you already have. What they require is starting before you feel ready, which is entirely different from being reckless. A wireframe built in an hour under pressure. A testing plan built from nothing because nobody else would. A meal prep system built around what actually breaks your week instead of what looks good on paper. Every one of them proves the same point: the plan you're waiting to perfect gets built by doing the thing, not by thinking about it longer.

The planning instinct isn't the enemy here. It's useful right up until it becomes a place to hide. If you've read this whole list nodding along and mentally filing it away for “when things calm down” or “once I have a better plan,” that's worth noticing. Things rarely calm down on their own schedule, and the plan tends to get clearer once you're already moving, not before.

Pick one thing from this list. Do it today, imperfectly, on purpose.

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