Some people in life are just naturally spontaneous. Like Tigger from Winnie the Pooh, they excitedly jump out of bed, ready to swing the banners of Carpe Diem and let the oncoming day hit them with heaps and heaps of fun. It may turn out to involve chatting with friends, having coffee in the sunshine in the city or taking lovely walks in the brisk evening air. At the end of the day, Tigger, having a feeling of contentment that the day was well spent, exhaustedly falls into bed and goes to sleep, dreaming happy dreams and resting for another day.

Setting definite times and deadlines for Tigger people, may, of course, be bothersome: It imposes a fixed point during the way when something has to be done, and it wrecks this casual mood of seeing what the day turns out like if you spontaneously poke at it in various different ways. It means that you can’t play at will in the Tunnels of Fun, because there’s an oncoming Train of Requirement that will not be negotiated with.

As for me, I’m not a Tigger person. I like planning.

I suppose it has something to do with my military interest, as well as my tendency to structure and organize. It’s a habit I have, organizing and structuring; whenever I’m faced with inefficiency, my natural tendency is to roll the sleeves up and methodically carve away at things until the organization is like a smoothly running machine. It doesn’t have to perfect – perfection is, in most cases, an inefficient (and unflexible!) use of resources – but I want it to purr like a cat.

A part of this is to make plans. I don’t know why it’s so much fun, but whenever a situation comes up that involves several activities (and possibly more people), I write an Operations Plan: A detailed listing of all activities and resources involved in the event, as well as checklists and a detailed timetable. It may also, depending on the requirements, contain small-scale maps of the target areas.

An example of this is when I travel overseas. The simple step of going to the airport may be illustrated in the following hypothetical scenario:

OPERATION FALLING LEAVES

Purpose: Vacation in Florida.
Timeframe: 3 OCT 2006 - 14 OCT 2006

STEP 1 - INITIAL PREPARATIONS

(list of things to prepare, including
   - packing
   - procurement of necessary items
   - and so on...)

STEP 2 - DEPARTURE

0500       Wake up
0545-0550  Leave home
0730       Arrival at airport
0915       Flight departure
...

And the list goes on.

This, of course, does not rule out spontaneity. Doing things on a whim, being spontaneous and having fun, is indeed possible with accurate planning; waking up like Tigger one day and saying “ooh, I know, let’s go there and there today” is possible just because I had the passport, credit card, exchange of currency and other items on my “initial preparations” list, and I also happen to have a set of contingency plans if anything goes wrong.

I call this “operational spontaneity”.

At the end of the day, I don’t fall into bed, content that the day was well spent; I fall into bed with the happy feeling that my Operations Plan executed so well. As I drift off into sleep, the last fleeting thought through my brain is a smug satisfaction that my contingency operations worked exactly as planned; the machine worked smoothly… just like a purring cat.