Inspiration comes from strange places

I have struggled with lesson planning my entire career. I know I talk about this a lot and I know to some it may seem rather trivial, but this is huge for me. I was never taught how to properly lesson plan in my teacher education program. I had to create a lesson plan. I was shown interesting things to do with lessons. But creating a system of teaching a topic, putting it in an orderly fashion, and creating daily plans for doing that was never taught to me. I'm the type of person who needs to be shown step by step and be able to ask questions. How is this done? What if this happens? How do I handle this? I never had that. I was taught all about educational theorists. I was taught to do action research. I spent a lot of time learning things that literally never cross my mind now. But the stuff I really needed; how to create lesson plans, how to plan a day, a week, a month, a school year, how to handle the massive amounts of paperwork that being a teacher generates; I was taught none of that stuff. And over the years, I've tried many, many different methods but none of them seem to work well for me or for long.

I've tried flying by the seat of my pants and that just creates far too much stress and the lessons end up really disjointed. I also forget if I've taught something - very embarrassing. I've tried creating detailed lessons well in advance and that hasn't worked either. Things don't go as I planned. I get delayed and boom, everything gets thrown out the window. So those 2 extremes don't work and I know that from years of teaching.

In a group I belong to, the admin just posted something that really got me to thinking. Maybe, there is some middle ground between the above situations. She wrote this:

I recommend using a pacing guide or curriculum map to sketch out a rough idea of what you're going to teach during the year and when. Detailed day-by-day lesson plans are then written one unit at a time (or at a minimum of 1-2 weeks at a time.) I think this more holistic approach produces better lessons which mesh together well and align with assessment AND it keeps you from falling into a day-by-day lesson planning trap which is super stressful.

And something went ding in my head. The system that worked best for me was something very similar. I would plan out the year and then fill it in in small chunks, either units or weeks. I think this is the best idea I've heard in a while. She also states that:

What's occurring to me now is that the issue might actually be related to overplanning. When lessons are planned in advance, we tend to get overambitious. We write too much stuff down, don't get to it all, and have to spend a ton of time trying to adjust things for each following day.
We then draw the (false) conclusion that planning in advance must be impossible, because too much is going to change between now and then. But the truth is that when we plan for only for one day at a time, we're more realistic with what can be accomplished. 

This!! So much this!!! This is me. I plan detailed lessons far, far in advance then scrap them because things got off track. Happens all the time.

So I need to revamp the way I think and the way I set up my plans. I have the first units for almost all my classes figured out. First, I'm going to go through and make sure my curriculum maps are solid. I think they are pretty good, just need to review them. Next, I'm going to go through my Introduction and Unit 1s to make sure those are solid. I will have a day-by-day for them that I can adjust as I go. Then I'm going to organize my resources by units and trash anything I don't want. If I have the first unit laid out and all my resources organized by units, planning should be a breeze next year.

Okay, now I have a plan that is reasonable and feasible to get set up over the summer. Writing detailed lessons for 3 preps for a whole year was not feasible.