A sixteen-step guide to making a really solid plan

Inspired by recent personal events.

1. Make a plan. Like really make it. Don't go about half-assing it, go deep as if you're diving in to bring back the titanic and all the riches in it. Intense planning, everything thought out. You're so ready, you're so pumped up.
   
2. Tell everyone about your plan. Your friends, whose place you're crashing at, bore them by talking about it all day and all night. Tell your parents. Tell all your aunts and uncles. Even your grandparents. Write it in your blog too.
   
3. Reach out to people you haven't heard back in a while. Your friends from college, old high-school friends, coworkers from a previous job in a different city. Cute girls you met in your year studying abroad. Tell them all about your glorious new plan, and invite them to become a part of it. Make them all real excited.
   
4. Reconsider your plan. Like tell them you really really thought about it, and while everything makes sense, you're not really sure if it's a good time to make such a big decision and maybe you should hold off on such things until things become more clear.
   
5. Back out of your back-off, and tell people you were reconsidering your plan for a day or two, but that's done now, you're really really sure you know what you want to do, and that is what it is, you're not going to change your mind, ever, on this.
   
6. Forget about it for several days. Get lost in the youtube hole. If the weather's nice, go out and let yourself be distracted!
   
7. Make other plans. Alternative course of actions, if your original plan doesn't work out. Make a list of the top three.
   
8. Explore each of your top three alternatives in great detail. Exquisite research. Call people across time zones, explain to them what you're thinking, get their opinions. Talk for several hours with them about nothing but your plans and how it might fit in with everything.
   
9. Update everyone you talked to on the second and third steps about your alternative plans, and let them know you're so flexible because of everything happening right now. You're a practical man after all.
   
10. Forget about all your alternative plans. They were all backups, ideas you hadn't really considered for a good reason to begin with, and that's why they're backups. You either go all-in, or you don't. Abandon all your backup plans.
    
11. Forget about all your planning and alternatives and this bs for a while, couple of days ideally because of your work situation...you're busy, you haven't talked to close friends you aren't living with in a while, it's fine happens to everyone.
    
12. Raise doubts about your original plans to your closest and the dearest, explaining to them why that could be a terrible decision to make right now.
    
13. Forget about everything.
    
14. Talk to people, maybe roommates, maybe friends maybe other people, you haven't talked to in recent months, who don't know about your plans. Tell them about your plans that you haven't thought about in a few days, while allowing doubt to seep up. Let them try to talk you out of it.
    
15. Evaluate all possible options, think of new options, new ideas, etcetera, completely out-of-the-box-thinking. Take all of these ideas as seriously as the first.
    
16. Abandon them all, including the original idea. Go to the path of least resistance, which is allowing things to go as they are because this is not a time to make risky transitions or decisions, the whole world has paused and so should you. Give yourself some space man!