Last week I unveiled my plan, experiment really, to create more time by automating certain life processes and going against my nature to get organised.

Operation Wardrobe Wizard was interesting. Spending 1.5 hours picking clothes once a week may not necessarily have saved time, but my choices were more interesting, and it certainly reduced stress having those ducks lined up ahead of time.

There was one drawback — often the fun outfits ended up being totally inappropriate on the day. Mine isn’t a 9-5 life. Work is sometimes one-to-one clients, sometimes group presentations, but I’m also a full-time mum, a dog-walker, a property manager, an exerciser, a cleaning lady and a volunteer. I don’t want to be wearing that fab new LBD from Orange Bay to help out on school cupcake decorating day.

I have to know exactly what I’m doing in advance in order to automate. Same goes for my weekly menu planning/one-time grocery shop idea (rotating every three weeks with tweaks for seasonal changes). Sounds great right? But if I don’t know which nights I’m out or have plans, the point of time-saving and efficiency will be lost.

Picking one random thing to organise isn’t working, each system hinges on others already being in place. First I have to know what my week looks like, but to do that I need to know how the month will play out. The month is somewhat dependent on what I expect to achieve in the year. Organising, it seems, is not simply setting ducks in a row, it’s tessellating an entire bird sanctuary in some kind of elaborate waterfowl Tetra.

So I’ve gone meta. I’ve started by considering what I actually want out of life. What goals this year will contribute to these outcomes? How will I need to pace myself monthly to achieve them? I’ve made a list of what weekly actions I’ll need to take and the daily activities and automations to include, adding timeframes for each. I’ve broken down my entire week into half-hour time slots and am endeavouring to fit everything into a sustainable timetable so that it all gets done and time no longer gets devoured by faffing.

Sounds pretty awesome. Now it’s just a case of sticking to it. My BF came by and saw my weekly domination schematics. She thinks I’m mad: “Won’t all that regimentation drive you crazy?”

It does seem a little extreme perhaps. But for the past few years I’ve been operating under the false illusion that ‘easy-breezy’ (aka lacking a plan) was the road to creativity and happiness. All I’ve found though is that chaos usually only breeds chaos. Sometimes we must swing the pendulum away fully to find a happy medium.

So far I’ve managed to blow past almost all my deadlines, too easily drawn into conversation or sucked down the internet. But practice makes better. I’m not going for perfect, ‘fine’ will do. These ducks will take a bit of jostling but I’m hoping their order will lead to flight. We’ll see …

• Julia Pitt is a trained success coach and certified NLP practitioner on the team at Benedict Associates. For further information contact Julia on 705-7488, www.juliapittcoaching.com.