4 min read
Two weeks ago I told you a plan is only worth something if it can survive being changed. Then I proved it, when a surprise job interview blew a hole through my beautifully mapped July within a day of publishing.
I said that wasn't the plan failing. That was the plan doing its job.
Now we're at the halfway point, and it's time to stop talking about how resilient the plan is in theory and actually look at the scorecard.
Back on July 1, the plan I handed to AI came with three goals. Book 5 client sessions for Your Family Brief, my household consulting business. Post 2 to 3 times a week. Get the newsletter far enough ahead of schedule that a family trip to the UK wouldn't put any pressure on it.
Three goals, one calendar, fifteen days in. Here's where each one actually stands.
The newsletter is the part of this experiment nobody's giving enough credit to.
Two issues have gone out on schedule. A third is fully built, written, designed, and just needs the button pressed to schedule it. The only real gap left is two more issues that still need drafting before the UK trip, and there's still runway to do it.
Think of the newsletter like a slow cooker versus everything else, which is more like cooking six things on six burners at once. Once it's set up, it just needs a check-in now and then. That's exactly the kind of task an explicit, written-down plan is good at protecting, because it doesn't need you to be in a certain mood or in front of a camera. It just needs you to open the document and type.
Client sessions booked this month: zero.
That's the number that was supposed to move the most, and it hasn't moved at all. And when I actually looked at why, the honest answer wasn't "I didn't try." It was that the thing driving new sessions, which is people actually seeing the content, mostly stopped happening.
Here's the number that explains it. One TikTok video has gone up since the whole thing launched. One. The posting cadence looks fine if you only count Instagram, but the videos are the part that reach new people, the way a flyer taped to a lamppost reaches people a sign in your own front yard never will. And the videos are exactly the thing that kept getting bumped, week after week, because they need me on camera, and the static graphics don't. A graphic is always faster to make than a video, so on a full day, the graphic wins and the video slides to next week. Then next week has its own full day.
Three weeks of the same handful of video ideas have now rolled from one weekly plan to the next, untouched. That's not an accident. That's a pattern, and once I finally sat down and looked at it plainly, it was obvious.