I shared eight things I wish people would have told me when I was in high school in a recent presentation. Here’s another one I probably heard several times. I just wished I would have listened sooner! I will be sharing number eight today.

• Do a lot of planning and counting the cost. Make a list every day of daily, weekly, and yearly goals. Things may really start to happen!

There has been a lot of work to do on our new farm since we moved here about 5 ½ years ago. Before we moved here, I was a fly by the seat of my pants sort of girl. Living in a camper the first 18 months (which was way longer than I had anticipated) while we completely gutted and remodeled the house, cleaned up the farm, grew the size of all of our animals, planted gardens, orchards, and fields, expanded our 3 businesses, homeschooled our kids, grew, raised, and traditionally prepared most of our food, helped others, had numerous people out to the farm (even though things were a mess), and later had two more babies at home changed that. We did this all while my husband worked a full-time job about 45 minutes away from the farm.

These experiences have taught me how important it is to plan, and how taking the time to do this, actually saves a lot of time in the long run and helps us to be more efficient. What has kept us from losing our minds, along with not completely destroying our savings, has been the constant planning, counting the cost, and most importantly God’s grace. There were so many times when my husband and I just wanted to hire someone to come and help us, but since we had committed to not having debt, we knew it wasn’t an option. We watched the Lord provide friends that helped us out and extra money to be able to hire some of the work done. This experience has definitely taught me more patience (I could still use more!) and given me a desire to keep planning, knowing that things will usually happen more efficiently. During the chaos we also found it critical to make sure we prioritized the most important things. That’s where value-based decision making came in. Hopefully I can share more about that a different day. Well, I better get back to that list I was telling you about! Do you love to plan or do you fly by the seat of your pants? We would love to hear from you!