Hello and welcome to best laid plans.

This is your host, Sarah Hart Unger, and this is the podcast where we talk to all

things planning and planning adjacent.

This is definitely a planning adjacent kind of episode, and I admit I was going to do a planner

review episode today. I ordered three kind of very different planners for 2024, and I was going to

compare and contrast and talk about all of them. However, only one of the three has arrived in my mailbox and the other two,

I believe, are coming today or tomorrow, but I didn't want to leave my recording team in the

lurch and have them have to process this last minute. So I decided to talk about something else,

which has been on my mind lately, especially given the current news cycle and what is going on.

And it's one of those kind of from

the heart episodes, which usually a lot of people enjoy. So hopefully this will be no exception.

A lot of times when I do these kinds of episodes, they are almost as much for me as they are

for you all, the listeners. Like they're on some topic that I find very

challenging as well, just as my prior episodes on screen time in particular have been

addressing my own struggles in that area and my thoughts on it after I've done some work

on it, I guess I'd say. So this one is all about managing inputs and reactivity and

interruptions, both those interruptions that come from the outside world and those that come from

the inside. And I can 100% assure you this is a work in progress for me, just as it is, I think, for many of us. So let's get into

the meat of what I'm talking about. We hear a lot of discussion of proactivity versus reactivity.

Proactivity is when you are kind of in charge of your time, planning things out, and having them come to fruition,

and deciding what you're going to do and then doing it.

You're proactively looking ahead and not necessarily thinking about changing your plan

...