[00:00:00] Dana Stanley: If your Disney planning process currently looks like lying awake at night, staring at the ceiling thinking, well, what if I switched our Epcot day to Thursday? Or if you already made your dining reservations, but you keep canceling it and then rebooking it again. Or you keep writing things down because you feel like you’re missing something, like you’re doing dishes and you have to grab a piece of paper to write something down because you just can’t put your finger on what you’re forgetting.

[00:00:28] Dana Stanley: You might be over planning. And today we’re gonna talk about it, what it really means to over plan, how to spot it early on, and what to do instead. So you can actually enjoy the trip you’re spending all this time and money on. Hello and welcome to the Laid Back Magic Way podcast. I’m your host, Dana Stanley.

[00:00:46] Dana Stanley: Creator of Laid Back Magic. As a mom of three, I know how tough it can be to find time to plan a Disney World trip. That doesn’t leave you feeling stressed or overwhelmed. That’s why I’m here to help moms like you create Disney vacations that feel even better than they look on paper here. We’re not chasing perfection, but creating our next favorite memories.

[00:01:05] Dana Stanley: So whether you’re brand new to Disney or looking to go deeper into the details. This podcast is your go-to for simple tips, mindset shifts, real life trip recaps, and expert insights to make your trip magical and manageable. New episodes drop every Monday, so be sure to subscribe so you never miss a moment.

[00:01:22] Dana Stanley: Okay, let’s dive in. So I’m gonna be honest with you, there have been trips where I didn’t even feel like excited about walking into Magic Kingdom. I had this feeling of, I don’t know if you wanna call it. Dread or just anxiety maybe, and not because I didn’t wanna be there, but because I was just so exhausted from the planning to get me there.

[00:01:49] Dana Stanley: I had spent so much time obsessing over every detail, like where we’d eat, what time we would get on the bus, where to watch the parade, and like where the parade would be at a certain spot and what time to get there. That by the time that day actually came, I was just mentally tapped out. And it reminds me of when you work on something, maybe like a tech issue, like maybe if you’re a business owner, like your website and you’re dealing with like codes and URLs and you’re going back and forth or setting up like a new email system, something like that.

[00:02:25] Dana Stanley: And by the end of the day you say to your husband like, oh, my brain hurts. Like I need to sit on the couch and not think about anything for a while. I think everyone has gotten that feeling sometime or another, depending on like. Different scenarios, but you know that feeling and that is the feeling you really don’t want before vacation.

[00:02:48] Dana Stanley: And what makes it even harder is that planning is necessary. You’ve heard me say it like over and over and over, obviously, that you can’t just show up to Disney World and hope for the best and wing it. But there’s this really fine line between planning enough so that you’re prepared and can relax when you’re there.

[00:03:05] Dana Stanley: And planning so much and worse too much that it just sucks the fun out of everything before you even get there. And that’s the line that I wanna talk about today. So first, let’s get a real definition. So I looked it up and according to the dictionary, over planning literally means. To quote excessively, organize schedule, or arrange details ahead of time, often leading to inflexibility stress or a diminished ability to adapt.

[00:03:34] Dana Stanley: And honestly, like it’s the perfect description. When I read that, I was like, oh my gosh, it’s exactly what I’m talking about when it comes to Disney. So just to reiterate, to excessively organize schedule or arrange details ahead of time, often leading to inflexibility stress or a diminished ability to adapt excessively arranging, that’s the part that I’m noticing is it’s not the arranging of details, it’s the excess of arranging details.

[00:04:05] Dana Stanley: That’s what’s leading us to feeling stressed and not able to adapt and be flexible. And when I think about over planning, I mean kind of like two things. So one, you’re actively taking too much time to plan, like your planning is taking too much time, like before the trip, your mental energy that you are using to prep for the vacation itself.

[00:04:30] Dana Stanley: It’s sucking it all up way before the trip starts, and then two, you’re trying to cram too much into the trip itself. You’re over planning. The trip, like the things you have planned aren’t realistic or feasible because you’ve got so much packed into every day. And both of these can happen separately, but usually if you’re doing one, you’re doing the other.

[00:04:53] Dana Stanley: You’re overthinking and you’re overt stuffing the trip. Now let’s walk through some of the clearest signs that you might be over planning. And this is not coming from a place of like. You are doing something wrong and you know you should listen to me. This is coming from me who like overthinks every single thing and has anxiety and wants everything to be perfect.

[00:05:21] Dana Stanley: I’m a perfectionist, so I have lived all of these things and I still do, but there are signs that I see now and I’m like, oh. Like you’re doing it again and you can quickly reel it in and it makes such a big difference. After we go over these signs, I’m going to give you some tips on what to do instead of doing these things.

[00:05:41] Dana Stanley: So the first sign and one of the biggest giveaways is when you’re bouncing back and forth and just can’t make up your mind. You set a plan, then you second guess it, you switch it. Then you ask someone else what they think, and then you switch it again and you start to feel better. For like a day until you switch it back to the way you had it in the first place.

[00:06:02] Dana Stanley: And you just get really frustrated at yourself. And this is going to happen a little bit for sure, like it’s normal to shift things around. But really that should all be happening before you book anything, before you’re setting things in stone. So when I’m sketching our trips, I am definitely bouncing back and forth and racing and plugging things in.

[00:06:23] Dana Stanley: But only for like in the moment, not days or weeks later, if that makes sense. Like I’m moving things around during this one planning session and then it’s done and I move on to the next thing. But if you find yourself, you know, reading another blog post or someone on Facebook tells you like a new hack, and now you’re kind of back into that spiral again.

[00:06:46] Dana Stanley: That’s your sign, and if this is happening, it’s not because you’re like bad at planning. I really think this happens when you don’t have clear intentions or a vision or whatever you wanna call it, guiding your decisions. Because when you know what matters to you most in the trip. Like your non-negotiables.

[00:07:06] Dana Stanley: And when you have those set, it’s a lot easier to say yes to the right things and kind of just let the rest go. So if you see things pop up in your feed, you’re like, well, I don’t care about that because X, Y, Z. And this isn’t something I think a lot of us want to talk about because it’s not like a tangible thing of someone telling you what to do.

[00:07:26] Dana Stanley: Like just do this. And it’s not flashy or sexy, but that’s why you need to do it because literally no one else can tell you this part. And I’m not talking about like, what time do the buses start running the Magic Kingdom. Like, yes, you need to know that. You can research that, but I’m talking about things that require more of like an opinion on what you’re deciding on what to actually fill your day with, because for those kinds of things, when you don’t have little guide marks, you’re constantly looking outside of yourself for the quote right answer.

[00:08:00] Dana Stanley: And there isn’t one. That’s actually why I created a. Laid back Magic Journal. You can grab it for free@laidbackmagicway.com slash journal because it’s not about planning more because at a certain point you kind of have to just stop and get really clear on why before you’re diving into the what.

[00:08:21] Dana Stanley: Otherwise, you’re gonna keep just changing your plans and moving things around and wonder why your planning is taking so long. Another kind of red flag, if you wanna call it that, is when your timeline or your park plans for the day have too many timestamps. And what I mean by this is normally if I was looking at your park day plans, I’d wanna see three times the first, I wanna see like the Disney world times like when it opens the parade time, fireworks.

[00:08:55] Dana Stanley: If you’re gonna see fantas, things that are out of your control and set in stone and are like definite. Great. Another thing that would be set in stone would be your lightning lane. Return times if you booked those, and then any dining reservations that you have. So just things that are like very concrete past that.

[00:09:13] Dana Stanley: I don’t want to see timestamps. I don’t wanna see like 30 minute blocks, like 9:45 AM We’re gonna get a bathroom break, 11:30 AM Browse the gift shop 12:00 PM go visit Mickey. Like I definitely. I think I learned a lot of this. My brain is just wired now. When I see a timeline from back when I used to film weddings, I would be sent a timeline either from the wedding planner, which usually didn’t really have any red flags, but if I had a timeline sent from the bride, ooh, like, you know, 30 minutes for first look and 30 minutes for makeup, and me and the photographer look at each other.

[00:09:56] Dana Stanley: Like knowingly, like, yeah, that’s not gonna happen. And the same thing can happen with a park day, not letting just some buffer time or just room with nothing. You can put like other rides that you wanna do in between those anchors. Of course I do that too. But when you add a time for each of those things, what ends up happening is you feel behind like the entire day.

[00:10:24] Dana Stanley: It’s awful and it really feels awful when you’re someone that has control issues like me, and I’m gonna say this completely from a place of like, I get it so much that if you’re telling yourself, if I just plan enough. Like if I just think of every scenario, then nothing will go wrong. And this is sign number three, that you’re setting yourself up for disappointment when you’re trying to control too much, because Disney World is still gonna be real life.

[00:10:55] Dana Stanley: The weather’s gonna change, your cookie gets sick. At the worst time possible, you might miss a lightning lane because you know you got the time wrong or you canceled it by accident. It’s not if something will go wrong, it’s just when and what. It’s just one of life’s great treasures and over planning can create this like false sense of control.

[00:11:20] Dana Stanley: Like you feel confident that you’ve thought of everything. So then when something does happen. That is out of your control. It just gives you just this like icky feeling. And I will give you an example of something that happened to me years ago that I still, it still bothers me. So we had done a split stay, which means you start at one resort and switch to another resort.

[00:11:47] Dana Stanley: So we were staying at the boardwalk and then we switched to the Polynesian. And of course, the right thing to do, quote right, is to plan your Epcot and Hollywood Studios days in the beginning and then end with your Magic Kingdom Day. So. We had tickets to this event that they no longer have of, I wanna say it was like Magic Mornings or Morning Magic, something like that.

[00:12:13] Dana Stanley: And we had to get to Magic Kingdom very early. I’m like, this is perfect. ’cause we’re saying the Polynesian, I’m gonna take the monorail. I’m gonna book this breakfast experience because it’s gonna be so easy to get to Magic Kingdom. Of course, that morning at the Polynesian, the monorail just went down.

[00:12:32] Dana Stanley: Now the trying to control too much part. Maybe I would’ve like even thought of this as a thing, but it’s not something that you can do anything about. So they offer buses fine. Little frustrating. Go downstairs, get on the bus. No big deal. I kid you not. The bus got lost and I have never had this happen. I don’t even know, like, I don’t know like the behind the scenes of what was going on, but I just, I mean, think of how close we were to Magic Kingdom if you were on a bus from the Polynesian.

[00:13:05] Dana Stanley: And I just remember thinking like, I feel like we’ve been on the bus a while and then me and my husband kind of start looking around and I don’t know where we ended up, but there was like railroad tracks like. There was a railroad and I remember like him going really slow. It’s like a back like woodsy area with railroad tracks.

[00:13:26] Dana Stanley: I don’t know where we were, and at this point I was truly like, mad freaking out. We’re gonna miss blah, blah, blah. I remember he had stopped on the railroad tracks for some reason, and the doors opened. I don’t know if it was because he had to, ’cause it was a bus or like an accident. He hit the wrong button, I think he just hit the wrong button and eventually we made it to Magic Kingdom.

[00:13:49] Dana Stanley: And the bus driver, the poor bus driver, like he apologized and I think he mentioned something of like he had never done that route before. Something and we ended up making it on time and everything was fine, but the control freak in me felt terrible. And here’s the thing, if I had tried to out plan what had happened, if I had known that ahead of time, it wouldn’t have done me any good.

[00:14:19] Dana Stanley: So I would’ve just been thinking and worrying and wondering if it would’ve happened. And honestly, it just would’ve been a waste of time. So just know that things will at some point divert you and you don’t know what it is. So. I say it with love that you cannot just plan enough and nothing will go wrong.

[00:14:40] Dana Stanley: You’re just gonna set yourself up and drive yourself crazy. The fourth sign is a little sneakier and hard to put your finger on. It’s that feeling that. No matter how much you tweak your plans or organize your days or book better dining, there’s this weird gap, like you’re worried you’re forgetting something.

[00:15:03] Dana Stanley: The plan doesn’t feel right, and nine times out of 10 it’s going to be back to that clear intention underneath it all. And when you’re missing that, you’re kind of just throwing spaghetti at the wall and just booking things willy-nilly. This is gonna be a sign that your. Going after some version of the quote, perfect trip, but you don’t actually know what that looks like for you.

[00:15:30] Dana Stanley: And when you haven’t gotten clear on what you actually want for the trip, I. It’s impossible to plan in a way that’s going to feel like complete and satisfying. It’s gonna be just this vague sense of like how things should be or could be better somehow. And this is where, again, setting your intentions before you get into that nitty gritty planning is so important.

[00:15:53] Dana Stanley: So if you’re feeling like just something’s missing. That’s probably a sign that you’re just over planning. Okay, so what do we do now if all of these have resonated or we’ve done all of these things or some of these things, here’s what I recommend outside of like the whole intention thing. ’cause I think I beat that to death officially.

[00:16:12] Dana Stanley: And first it’s going to just pick your non-negotiables. So decide what the absolute core or bones of your trip are before you start planning anything else. It could be that you want to like blow your 13-year-old son’s mind with throw rides. It could be that you want to actually like feel relaxed and life has been busy and you want it to be like very calm.

[00:16:38] Dana Stanley: Or it could be that you’ve been away from your kids a lot, so you really want to feel like connected with your kids and like not have your phone out every two seconds. Maybe it’s bringing the grandparents and it’s their anniversary and you kind of like wanna love on them a little bit and show them how much you appreciate them.

[00:17:00] Dana Stanley: Whatever it is, just name it, get it down on paper. Amish is kind of like a brain dump of like, this is actually what I care about. Second is to use the 3, 2, 1 method. So this is the formula that I use for all of our park days. For each park day, I pick three rides. That we absolutely have to do. It doesn’t have to be like the big rides.

[00:17:22] Dana Stanley: It could be the teacups with, you know, no weight. Not like the three lightning lanes, just three rides that we absolutely have to do. For example, in Epcot and my kids specifically, they have to ride a figment. They have to ride Sorin. And usually Remy’s is like the third thing. Sometimes it, it switches up those three rides like a must do.

[00:17:46] Dana Stanley: They could be sprinkled out throughout the day, but I like just getting them done more in the morning or at least attempting to, because there could be, you know, rain, if it’s an outdoor ride, it could close with like thunderstorms and stuff. A lot, right. Just closed down. So just better to put those towards the top.

[00:18:04] Dana Stanley: And then two experiences. So these are. Like more thoughtful things that are not rides usually free. Come with your park ticket so you could watch a show the parade, meet a character, but then it could also be something else, like a true experience like go to RAF’s Planet Watch. In Animal kingdom or visit a playground in one of the parks, like that would be an experience.

[00:18:30] Dana Stanley: I could list so many more experiences, but you can think like more out of the box here. It could be like a tequila tasting for your husband or something. Just again, an experience. And then last is just one dining reservation, two round out the day. Not have to make a decision of where you’re eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

[00:18:50] Dana Stanley: You have one decision made that can free up your brain. Like, okay, we are having lunch here. Mom doesn’t have to think about anything and we’re gonna sit down and food is going to be handled. And I don’t want this to get confused with like, oh, we’re locals and we’re just only doing three rides today. And like being lazy or like a low key day.

[00:19:10] Dana Stanley: You’re gonna do so much more than this, but this is what you have to focus on to keep from over planning and keep from going into those spirals. The 3, 2, 1 method is the way to go. When I shared the 3, 2, 1 idea on Instagram four years ago, people like really latched onto it, and I know it’s because it’s just the right balance of not too much.

[00:19:35] Dana Stanley: Not too little and it feels good when you don’t have a lot of expectations or like a lot of must dos, and then you actually get to do those three things. Everything else just feels like a bonus. Everything else is just icing on the cake. And third is to just focus on what your family likes. It sounds so obvious, but a lot of people miss it.

[00:19:57] Dana Stanley: There’s no point in booking bi boppity boutique if your daughter hates wearing dresses like mine, and there’s no point of eating at be our guest if no one in your family will actually like the food. So build a trip that actually fits, you know, your family, your people. And what you’re already doing anyway at home and like the way that you guys like to vacation when all else fails and you still feel this way, I would find a community or group or person where you feel like the advice that they give actually fits your style.

[00:20:37] Dana Stanley: If you’re in a Facebook group, for example, and everyone’s telling you. That they rode, you know, 20 rides before 12:00 PM because they rope dropped and stayed at this place. And then you’re like, but I have three toddlers or, okay, three toddlers is a lot. I have a toddler. And you’re like, okay, like this doesn’t feel right.

[00:20:59] Dana Stanley: Like that would make me miserable. I’m pretty sure. Then move on and find a new space. Someone you can show your plans to and help them point out your red flags. Someone you can run things by when you keep second guessing. Sometimes you just need an outside perspective from someone that you actually know.

[00:21:17] Dana Stanley: So look for people who. Maybe have kids of similar ages or kids with similar interests or husbands with similar interests or like similar styles of trips that maybe like aren’t trying to do everything. That will really help with the over planning as well. If any of this resonated with you. Because same.

[00:21:39] Dana Stanley: Make sure you grab that free journal. It’s again, laid back magic way.com/journal. It’s gonna help you set those intentions, kind of see like the overall vibe of your family. And we’ll definitely help you stop that second guessing and feel a little bit more confident as the trip planner of your family.

[00:21:59] Dana Stanley: Alright, that’s it for today. I hope this episode was helpful, if you’re feeling stuck with your planning, and I will see you next week. Thank you so much for joining me on this episode. Episode of the Laid Back Magic Way podcast. If you enjoyed today’s episode and it was helpful for you, it would mean the world to me.

[00:22:17] Dana Stanley: If you’d write a quick review, your reviews, help more moms like you find the show, and I read every single one of them seriously. Thank you in advance. You can find me on Instagram at somewhere worthwhile, and I’d love to hear from you there. DM me if you have any questions about this episode or what you’d like to see in future ones.

[00:22:34] Dana Stanley: Until then, keep planning for your next favorite memory. And I’ll see you next time.