You Don’t Need a Full Plan – You Just Need a First Step

One of the biggest reasons planning goes wrong is you’re not actually planning around your life. You’re planning around the version of yourself you wish you had time to be.

Let’s say you’ve got two people.

One has a full family setup - kids, school runs, clubs, maybe a job, definitely a house to run.

The other? Maybe they’re single, work for themselves, and can technically start whenever they like.

Different situations, same-size to-do lists.

Both of them want to get everything done. Both feel like they’re constantly behind.

But they’re stuck for completely different reasons.

The time-poor one usually hasn’t stopped to look at what time they actually have available. - like, properly looked.

They’re planning from some imaginary version of the day where everyone magically entertains themselves, the laundry cleans itself, and they’ve got five uninterrupted hours to “focus.”

Then, they get to the end of the day, they’ve only ticked off one thing from their four-item list, and they end up feeling like they’re the failure. (Not the plan. Them.)

The time-rich one?

They’ve got all day. Which means it always feels like there’s time to do it later - and if there’s always more time, there’s always more time to avoid it. So things drift, days blur, and the business doesn’t move... and the guilt creeps in quietly, but constantly.

Totally different situations - but the same result: feeling stuck, guilty, and wondering why planning never seems to work.

Before you start overthinking the whole thing, start here:

Most people try to start from the beginning.

But that’s usually where the overwhelm kicks in - because suddenly, there’s a million things you could do, and every one of them seems to depend on something else you “should probably sort out first.”

That’s how you end up neck deep in work, doing everything but the thing you set out to do.

So instead - start at the end.

What’s the actual thing you’re trying to create? - A blog post? An email sequence? A new offer?

Whatever it is - start there, and work backwards.

For example, If I want to publish a blog post, I know I’ll need:

From there, I can figure out what step comes just before that, and then the step before that - until I get to something small enough that I can actually do it today.

What most people do is jump straight into “I’m going to write my blog post”... and five minutes later, they’re down a rabbit hole of “Oh, but I need a blog layout,” “Oh, I need to check my SEO,” “Wait - I still haven’t finished that branding thing?…”

And nothing gets written.

If the step you’re looking at still feels overwhelming - break it down again, and again, if you need to.

Until it feels boringly doable.

That’s how you know it’s the real first step.

Most people overestimate what their first step should look like.

They think it needs to be impressive, or productive, or big enough to count. But the only thing your first step needs to be is doable.

Not exciting, not flashy, not something you can post about - just something you can put in motion without a fight.

Sometimes that means the first step isn’t “write the blog” - it’s “open the doc,” or “set a 10-minute timer and see what happens,” or even “go for a walk and think about what I want to say.”

The point isn’t to finish something straight away - The point is to get yourself moving in the right direction, on your terms, at your pace.

If it still feels too big, break it down again, and keep going until your brain stops throwing up resistance - That’s the sweet spot, that’s where action actually happens.

You don’t need a full plan, you just need a first step that feels like yours.

And if that step still feels too big? It’s not the wrong step - it’s just not small enough yet.