“What Are We Doing Now?”: The Power of a Roadmap
“Here’s your roadmap for the next set,” Emma, the Rumble instructor, said into her headset. When my eyes glanced at the screen, I could see bicep curls, tricep kickbacks, and mountain climbers ahead. Thirty seconds each. Twice through. When the timer started, I knew exactly where to begin. I made the most of my three-minute set, having had 15 seconds before the clock started to prepare.
The first evidence of my love of roadmapping came before the age of 3. One of my first dolls, named Baby Maloney after Baby Face Malone, was this rather ugly porcelain doll with its eyes closed that I fell in love with the first time I was allowed to play with her. On a trip to Cape Cod, my dad would hold Baby Maloney by the head and do a voice of an angry old man as Baby’s persona. Baby Maloney was a child-hating doll living in prison—otherwise known as a crib. Even though I was only three, my memory of Baby Maloney’s persona comes from a video my mom took with one of those video recorders you had to hold on your shoulder. In the video, she is interviewing Baby Maloney about her trip to Cape Cod. When I appear in the video, slowly approaching my doll, my dad—or rather, Baby Maloney, the child-hating doll—said, “What are we doing now? What are we doing now? Learn to say something else.”
Apparently, 2 months shy of my 3rd birthday, I was demanding to know what was next on the agenda. Long gone were the days trapped in my own prison, the playpen, bottle hanging out of my mouth, hand clutching Sesame Street figurines, staring into space. I was now a girl on the go, in need of answers. For years to come, saying “What are we doing now? What are we doing now?” became a mockery of my incessant need for information—when really, these questions served as foreshadowing a career in Project Management. I’m obsessed with knowing what I’m doing now and what I am doing next. I like having a roadmap—from our next stop on a road trip to the next exercise in a class.
When you hear the word roadmap, your mind harkens to company all-hands meetings where department heads grace the makeshift stage in your office lunchroom or take center frame on Zoom, confirming that you can hear them before launching into a spiel about OKRs, KPIs, and milestones, visually laid out on their quarterly roadmap. From a technical standpoint, a roadmap is a high-level strategic plan that outlines the vision, goals, and major milestones of a project, product, or initiative over time. That definition alone is chock full of corporate buzzwords that can make your head spin. A more digestible definition of a roadmap is: “A roadmap shows where you are going, why you are going there, and when key things will happen.”
Maybe you are not as structured as I like to be—adding in 15-minute commuting blocks between activities, pre-ordering a Juice Press smoothie two days in advance, and setting your watch alarm to go off at various points in the day to signal where to go next—but I bet you still like to have a sense of when key things will happen next.
For a minute, pretend your friend plans a full-day surprise adventure for you. How fun it will be to be in someone else’s hands for a day! Even if you’re down to clown, you probably still want to know:
When are you eating? Should you come hungry because the first stop is a pancake shop? Or should you come full, since lunch isn’t until 2?
Roughly how long will you be out? Long enough that you need to get a dog walker or pack “a little sweater”? Or not so long that you’re free to meet a different friend for dinner?
That might be all you need to know in relation to when key things will happen, but those two roadmap items—your eating checkpoints and the duration of activity—give your mind something to orient around, like how your living room furniture all points itself toward the television, as Joey notes in Friends.
Why do our minds need to orient around a schedule? By knowing what’s next, we ground ourselves in the present. I dare you to watch a movie without knowing the length of the runtime. I promise you’ll start to wonder—how much longer is this movie?!
Whether it’s a workout class, a product launch, or a day of fun, the presence of a roadmap—however loose—gives us something to hold onto. It’s not about rigid scheduling or micromanaging every moment; it’s about orientation. Knowing what’s next frees us to be more present in the now. The roadmap quiets the anxious part of our brains asking, “What are we doing now?” and gives us permission to focus, engage, and even enjoy. Don’t underestimate the power of a little structure. Because sometimes, just knowing what comes next is enough to keep us moving forward.
