Consciousness can only be now

All the planning is nothing but just a postponement of consciousness, at least at a personal level when you have a history of planning a lot and not actually following up on things. Because it is not an actual organic planning planning but just a diversion to avoid the real task, it would never work. 

For many of us, it is a constant struggle between consciousness of being in a moment and build something now or trying to build a pattern also known as a habit, and use that pattern to achieve some planned success in future. Most of the time, that trying to build a pattern or a habit thing wins, because consciousness in the present moment is always a difficult choice as most human minds run away from a difficult choice. 

Reality is often difficult. Trying to do something right now, trying to build something right now is Always difficult. So we wander towards this habit where we try to think of building new patterns or habits or make future promises to ourselves. I’ll do this after half an hour. I’ll do this tomorrow at 8 AM then at 10 AM, I’ll do this and 12 PM, I’ll do this, and basically they trade their present consciousness or present conscious moment with something in the future, which might or might not be there. So, the truth is, wasting too much time on thinking about trying to build patterns or habits is actually a bad idea. Because your complete life and its joys are here, in this moment.

I would tell you not to build habits or patterns or schedules, but that advice wouldn’t work in a normal world because sometimes to achieve material success, you might need them, e.g. to get a good job or to get good grades on exams and basically to achieve any merit based thing in human life, you’ll have to probably build some habits, build some patterns, and follow them. When you are trying for such things, follow a schedule or something to achieve or maintain a normal life, but make sure you don’t waste too much time trying to plan those patterns or habits. Instead plan very little, maybe plan only for your next task, a task which you need to do right now to achieve the material success you are after. Often these tasks are very basic and simple unless you are a scientist of some very complex discipline trying to save the world where you need to think about so many factors simultaneously.

When you follow this simple formula of only thinking or planning for your next task, you will remove so much resistance from your life. There are not many decisions to consider and take every moment. You will have so much more bandwidth to actually focus on the things you are doing.   

And don't worry about patterns and habits, they’ll be built along the way when you follow this task by task method, and the habits or patterns which are built this way would last a lot longer than the habits or patterns you tried to build inorganically, and they will be built without creating any unnecessary pressure or burden on your mind. Sometimes also known as Performance Pressure. Some people thrive in that kind of situation, but most people do not.