Best Laid Plans: A Simple Planning System for Living a Life That You Love

Best Laid Plans presents a planning system designed to help you move beyond reactive daily routines and create intentional structure around your goals and commitments. The book acknowledges the challenge of balancing multiple demands—family schedules, work, personal relationships, fitness, and household responsibilities—particularly for women managing the mental load across these areas. Without clear planning, daily obligations can feel overwhelming and personal aspirations may be neglected. Dr. Sarah Hart-Unger offers a planning method that works with your life's natural rhythms across different seasons. The system covers creating nested goals at yearly, monthly, weekly, and daily levels; planning in seasonal quintiles (five seasons rather than four); implementing a task management approach for to-dos; and building meaningful moments of connection and rest into each day. The goal is to replace daily scrambling with a clear plan that includes space for both productivity and enjoyment.