Hello and welcome to best laid plans. This is Sarah Hardunger and this is the podcast where we talk

all things planning and planning adjacent. It has come to my attention as I am gathering some of my

podcasting material together for a possible future project that I had never done an episode specifically dedicated to tracking things.

And I realized that was quite a gap because so much of planning involves collecting data and tracking things.

And I do believe it's a side of planning that has

some really wonderful aspects of it, but can also have a darker or negative side. And so I thought

this would be a really interesting thing to talk about. Before we delve into our topic, however,

today I'm going to start with a Q&A that I received that I really liked, even though sometimes I

save my questions to do all Q&A episodes. Lately, I've been combining them with review episodes

or a topic like this one. I'd be interested in hearing what you prefer, whether you like your

Q&A all at once. I do know that I certainly enjoy listening to podcasts when they're just all

Q&A because you never know what to expect. But at the same time, sometimes I feel like

you guys ask such good questions that I don't want to have to stay with them all. I want to

just answer them. So here we go with one of the questions. This one comes from a listener I

will call S, who has been listening to both best laid plans and best of both worlds, my other podcast that I do with Laura Vandercam for at least a year or two now.

And she said she has been meetings writing by the question for so long that now she has new questions, specifically related, well, one of the questions to the fact that

she is a new parent. She just gave birth to her first child in November of 2021 and is trying

to figure out how to make all the pieces fit together as a new mom. She is in academia and

married to a resident, so she feels a connection to me that way in my medical

life. So I thought these were just such great questions. The first one is about do-it-yourself

or zero-waste planning methods. She writes, although I love to Ogle Pretty Planners, I never

buy them for myself for several reasons. My planning needs very dramatically with some heavily scheduled

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