Spontaneous people annoy the hell out of me...

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Take my mother, for example.

I often plan what I'm going to do weeks, sometimes even months, in advance. Then, my mom will walk in and give me a 5 minute warning that she wants me to do something. She expects that unless I'm doing something for her, I'm not doing anything...

Ity seems that my act of making long term plans starts up events to undo them.

mabye if you try letting her know about your long term plans? Then, if she's being 'spontaneous', you can say that you told her about your plans. Might work.

Apparantly some people like last-minute activities. Most of the time I plan ahead. Even if there is a spontaneous event, like bad weather of traffic; I still have some things up my sleeve I intend to do.

I think it would be a good thing to tell about your plans, if you do not tell about them, how can people know? Also explaining about your 'difficult' planning?

yes this drives me nuts.
unplanned events suddenly ambush my preplanned events.
i respond poorly.

I am fairly spontaneous. In fact, I'm not much for planning. What do you all think of that?

I think it means you're a delightful variation on the overall theme. Entirely possible.

The best-laid plans may go to waste ...

It's not tha hard to the middle way between planning and spur-of-the-moment.

My ex-husband told me I was always changing plans on him, but the truth was, he never told me what his plans were. They were essentially in a hidden blueprint, written in invisible ink, in a steamer trunk, underneath the floorboards in the secret room that I never knew about. Glass-head syndrome. I was the same way, we just did not communicate. I advise to just make yourself clear, get a whiteboard, post "things I plan to do today" for your family to see. Or get a "do not disturb" sign. Just make sure to occasionally flip it to "disturb me please" or it will be ignored.

Slowmutant, although I can't say I'm not a planner out of necessity, I make the occasional spontaneous move, too, and I like surprises, as long as they are neutral surprises, not nasty surprises. What comfort rituals I do have are relatively unobtrusive. So I agree that it is possible to find a middle ground.

Im pretty spontaneous, but I dont expect other people to be thrilled by a sudden change in events as I know how annoying it is to be interrupted when doing something.

I'm slowly trying to increase my tolerance of unplanned activities. Rigidity of schedule is abhorrent, yet oh so comforting.

what I do , is , lie that something came up suddenly. That way, they cant really counter it. It has the same urgency as what they just mentioned. Or, you can just continue saying no, after a while, they cant really say anything. This happened to me , today, I was planning on going to this meeting. My mother starts talking about going to Church and then she starts discussing something else. I kept saying, that I couldnt explain, what I was going to do at such and such place, and that I wasn't going to Church. She tries to start a conversation. I repeated myself. And I did it in a calm manner. Don't give a indication that you are getting mad, they'll feed off of that.

Me too...this was the bane of my existing while I was growing up. My mom was always springing things on me unexpectedly and she would just expect me to roll with it.

Now that I am an adult, I manage my life in such a way that things are carefully planned. Of course, the unexpected still happens, but my life is fairly predictable.

This is one of the reasons why it was so painful to live with my parents.

My mom could call me at any time, and unless I ran to her (since it's obviously too much of a hassle for her to walk to where I was), I'd get in trouble for ignoring her... even if I couldn't actually hear her call.


But to tell the truth, I'm a spontaneous person myself. Not in that I try to control people, but more along the lines that I always need to base my activities on my health at the time. I have fatigue issues, partially because of being woken up in the middle of the night all the time (like tonight...) For example, I'll usually want to do something after work, like go to the library or hike, but unless I'm feeling well that day, it isn't going to happen.

Yeah, same here. I need time to plan before doing something, I feel your pain.