I had plans and timetables and lists all over the place for years. I felt like I couldn't manage everything that was on my plate if I didn't have it all planned precisely. I had anxiety over things like how many different kinds of produce did my kids have every single day or how many things could I complete before I had to leave the house at 3:02 to get my son in order to meet my daughter's bus at EXACTLY 3:18.

My T helped me a lot with it. We did a lot of work around realizing that the worst that would happen if everything didn't go perfectly according to my plans and lists wasn't really horrific. I had taken anxiety about trying to prevent absolute worst case scenarios in my life (a result of traumatic events in my past) and transferred it into trying to control EVERY aspect of my and my family's lives. I'm much more chill about things now. It doesn't stress me out to be a little early or a little late to something. I have a friend just like yours, and I make a mental note to try not to have anything scheduled around when I have plans with her that is time sensitive. If she's late to my house, I can throw in another load of laundry or do something fun with the kids briefly, knowing that I can finish quickly if she arrives, and I don't have to stress if she's later.

It took me a few months of working on this with my T to make some reasonable progress. That was a few years ago, now, and the effects have lasted. I do sometimes still make lists if I'm particularly stressed out and feel nervous about not remembering something, or several things, that are important. But I don't feel like I need to do that for everything now. It's freeing, because when I was heavily planning, I was irritated and frustrated A LOT with feeling even more out of control when things didn't go according to my plans. The fact of the matter is that a lot of what happens in my day isn't dependent solely on me, so making plans so heavily set me up for failure and caused a lot of undue stress.