If you’re taking a gap year right now, or are currently on one and are, having spent all of it so far working to save up money, now planning to embark on the adventurous part of the year, you may well be asking yourself the question: Is it going to be what I hoped it would?

It’s a fair question to ask yourself. Your gap year presents a unique opportunity to do something amazing and rewarding. We don’t mean unique in the sense that you’ll never have the chance to go travelling or to live in another country again–these are both things you can do later in life if you so choose–but more because you’ll never have the chance to do these things again in the earliest stages of your adult life, a time when you’re both largely free of responsibilities and have the enthusiasm and energy to dive headfirst into whatever adventures come your way.

However, it is sadly the case that sometimes people’s gap years don’t pan out the way they wanted, and they look back on this period of their life as a missed opportunity. Most of the time, this is down to two related yet opposite mistakes: underplanning and overplanning.

Underplanning

It’s easy to just take a carefree attitude to how the whole gap-year thing will pan out. You’ll go to all sorts of exciting places and do loads of crazy things. It’ll all take care of itself when the time comes to jet off abroad. No worries.

But then, before you know it, September has arrived and you’ve not got round to doing anything. Having not made the effort to decide specifically what you wanted to do, the gap year you vaguely imagined in your head never turned into reality. Granted, this is the most extreme scenario. In reality, most people at least manage to do a month or so of backpacking somewhere. But it still falls far short of what they’d originally dreamt of.

The moral of the story: make plans. And then take the steps to follow through with them. Book the tickets. Contact the volunteering organizations. Get the shots for tropical diseases. You get the idea.

Overplanning

Although underplanning is a peril for the gapista, so too potentially is overplanning. The overplanner doesn’t just get all their tickets booked and so forth well in advance; they also have planned out every last hour of their itinerary. While this process is all well and good for helping you get excited about your trip, it’s almost inevitable that such detailed plans won’t hold up once you’re there, and trying to make them do so will just be an exercise in continually swimming against the tide.

So yes, do plan; but not to the extent that you can’t change plans to go with the flow created by things like the friendships you make while you’re away and new things to see and do that you find out about while you’re away.