Guess which piece of advice from my dear dad has turned out to be the secret to a very excellent life?

A) Adhere to the “LIFO” method: Last In, First Out. (This is how we approached church as a family when I was growing up, thank God.) (Sorry, God.)

B) Practice the 5 P’s: Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance.

C) Horse race handicapping 101: Bet opinions, not emotions. And never bet the horse on the outside post position.

If you chose A, surely you’d like the article I recently wrote about the psychology of leaving early. But that’s not the secret to a very excellent life (although some of us will happily Irish exit ourselves right into the grave).

If you chose C, we need to talk—ideally in your Aunt Margie’s living room with your closest friends and relatives sitting in a semi-circle, avoiding eye contact with you, clumsily unfolding letters they are about to awkwardly read out loud. This is what we call a gambling intervention, Little Miss/Mr. Track Rat.

The answer is B. The 5 P’s are the secret to a very excellent life.

Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance.

I wish this life advice was glitzier.

I wish it involved something fanciful like, “drink more Champagne.” (Sidebar: let’s do that anyways! The earlier intervention was for gambling, not drinking.)

I wish the secret to a very excellent life didn’t sound like a snoozefest. Like a spreadsheet-pallooza. Like death by Gantt chart.

But sometimes a life worth living means we have to give two shits about it. We have to fathom what a wide and deep life might look like… and then somewhere between the dreaming and the doing is the planning. So yes, an astonishingly alive life wears a pocket protector.

Here’s a wee excerpt from my book on this topic:

The plans and ideas and intentions definitely won’t happen to you, without you having to put in a wee bit of effort to make them happen. What’s the difference between people who live like they’re dying, and people who die with all their ideas stuffed inside them?

The road to hell is paved with good intentions; I know this is true because I’ve paved several miles of it myself. I have to work hard at taking action with many of my dreams, because I’m inclined to dream them and then get sidetracked with the comings and goings of my life . . . and then lament that I never did the One Thing. You know what the secret is, the secret to doing Any of the Things? The secret to living like we mean it—other than memento mori-ing all over ourselves? The entirely unglamorous secret? Brace yo-self:

It’s your calendar.  

Planning things in your calendar makes things possible. It sounds face-stabbingly boring, I’m fully aware. But how else can you make intentions move from ideas to actual actions? How else can you make your One Thing a reality? How else can your Bite-Size Bucket List items transpire from bullet points on the list to actual visits to the fudge factory? How else can you tick things off your Ways to Widen My Life list and not get swept up instead by the tasky bits of life that will otherwise consume you—like roaming the aisles of Home Depot looking for fridge filters? You pick One Thing and then you schedule it.

A mild moment of defensiveness: in case you, too, suffer from bouts of all-or-nothing thinking, I want to remind you/ us of our previous conversation about the right dose of spontaneity, or “healthy impulsivity.” Today’s diatribe isn’t about overplanning our lives down to the hour. That would be a spectacularly ironic display of how to ruin a life, not make it very excellent.

Of course there’s a fine line between an intentionally planned schedule with breathing room for spontaneity and a militant, stifling minute-to-minute agenda. But you know you can fit more of the right things in—the things you’ve deemed that matter—if you plan them and then plot them in your calendar, right?

If you like to read sci-fi novels by the fire with a cup of rooibos, the book will not call out to you to get back to chapter three. The tea kettle will not start whistling on its own. The window of time to indulge in this sweet snippet of life will not present itself to you. You need to do the unexciting thing of planning it. Booking it into your calendar … making an appointment with yourself.

Let’s say you’ve identified friendship-bolstering as a top-tier priority.

Option 1: Identify friendship-bolstering as a top-tier priority . . . then do jack shit to bolster any of your friendships (because inertia will always be a compelling choice when you’re busy and tired).

Option 2: Identify friendship-bolstering as a top-tier priority . . . and schedule something friendship-like into your calendar—like a Friday afternoon FaceTime catch-up chat with Natalie, or trivia night at the pub with the guys next Thursday, or October 19^th as your White Mountains hiking trip with that one couple you don’t hate. Simply scheduling time together is a major difference-maker between friendships that are dead or alive.

Want to work out more? Block off two or three chunks a week in your calendar to get active, or schedule in a session with Brock the Trainer every Wednesday morning. Want to get an exciting project off the ground at work? Preserve blocks of time in your workday, instead of letting people railroad you into their meetings. Is the idea of personal growth calling you by name as of late? Register for the course and carve out actual time to complete the modules . . . like my client who set aside one hour before bed twice a week to become a Certified Nutrition Coach. Want to dream up and make an astonishing life happen? Block off a few hours here and there to live with width and depth.

Vitality and meaning aren’t going to come looking for you, knocking on your door and forcing you to pay attention to them. You are hereby required to make the space for the things you want to do, and that happens by making sure Saturday from 3 – 5pm is YOURS, for example.

Back when I was coaching, one of my clients started blocking off chunks of time in her calendar for her “alive” time, color coding them in her favorite bright aquamarine blue. She said if her week-at-a-glance wasn’t speckled with the color of the ocean, she knew she had some adjustments to make.

The only way I know to not end up with a bunch of garden-variety days passing me by is to put a smidgeon of thought into how to make those days fun and/or meaningful. Where might you benefit from planning a special day, or weekend, or date night, or time alone?

Take a look at your calendar right now. Where does something decidedly alive fit it? Where can you prioritize what makes you feel happy in your days and weeks and months? What can you schedule in before the next Monday of your life?

If Proper Planning (of our aliveness) Prevents Poor Performance (in these 4,000 Mondays we’ve been granted), let’s get on board with the colorless task of planful calendar management so we can experience vividly alive lives.

Last note: My dad picked out his tombstone in 2015 (OF COURSE HE DID), but if he hadn’t already done that you can bet I’d be chiseling the 5 P’s into the stone to mark his legacy.