Handling Disruptions and the Importance of Contingency Planning

I and many other people in the productivity world talk a lot about planning your day. However, what happens when your plans are frequently destroyed by other people?

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Episode 303 \ Script

Hello, and welcome to episode 303 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

As the Scottish poet Robert Burns once wrote “The best-laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley”. “Gang aft agley” can be translated as go awry. This means that no matter how well you plan your day or week, things are not going to go according to plan. Similarly, one of my favourite quotes that is often attributed to Mike Tyson is, “Everyone has a plan until they are punched in the face.” And it’s so true. 

One of the reasons so few people actually do a daily or weekly plan is because they believe that no matter what they plan, it is going to be torpedoed once they begin the day. A simple text message or email can derail the whole day. Yet, I still believe it is important to have a plan. Without a plan, you will be waiting for others to give you something to do. You will feel lost and never get anything important to you done, and you are guaranteed to build horrendous backlogs.

This leads me to this week’s question, and for that, it means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice.

This week’s question comes from Sasha. Sasha asks, Hi Carl, what tips do you have for me to harden my system so that it doesn't constantly wobble when life experiences significant deviations outside of the planned week? 

Hi Sasha, thank you for your question. 

Now, I know there is a little more background to your question. Specifically, managing two young children and both yourself and your wife working full time. 

So with that in mind the first problem people face is with being too structured. What I mean by this is being too specific about what you want to get done each day. Most of the things we want to get done around the house do not really need to be done on a specific day. For instance, I like to give my home office a really good clean on a Saturday morning, but more often than not something will come up that prevents me from being able to do that. 

Now if I want to follow my calendar religiously, it would annoy me if I was prevented from doing what I had planned, but really, does my office need a good clean specifically on a Saturday morning? No of course not. It would be nice, but it really doesn’t matter if I do it on Saturday morning or Sunday afternoon. The only thing that really matters is at some point in the week I do it. (But even then that is debatable). 

This problem can be exacerbated if you have young kids. With kids under the age of 13, there’s no way you will be able to maintain a well structured home. Kids were born with the natural ability to destroy all well intentioned plans. And that’s fantastic. It’s all part of the experience of raising children. If it didn’t happen, you’d miss out on one of life’s joys. 

I can promise you on the day your kids turn 13 you will miss all that disruption. Your kids are going to go from being entirely dependent on you to wanting to have nothing to do with you as they go through adolescence. 

For most of you, I hope, your family comes first. This means if you get irritated because a family member ungently, and unexpectedly, needs you you should be happy. It might be inconvenient, but family comes first. There’s no debate. If there is a debate, then perhaps family (or this particular family member) is not really your number one. 

One thing I’ve learned over the years is as soon as you involve another living creature in your plans, you are going to need to be flexible. My wife, for example, has no concept of time when it comes to family plans. She’s spot on with her time when it comes to friends or strangers, but when it comes to her family, her buffer is two or three hours. I remember not long after being married I used to have to lie to her about when we needed to be at the airport. If check in time was at 9:00am I would tell her it was 8:00am. This meant we were able to build buffer time into our plans. Today, she’s much better—I must have coached her well, but it did take ten years to get her to that state. 

And there will always be the unexpected. As you say, kids get sick and that changes everything. 

Now, as you both work, what contingency plans do you have in place for when a child cannot go to school or daycare centre? This is critical because you cannot plan for a child being sick. This is contingency planning and as soon as the decision to keep you child at home, what needs to happen? Do you call your parents and ask them to take care of your child, or does one of you need to stay at home? Ensuring your contingency plan is in place and ready to roll should the unexpected happen will save you a lot of stress and panic. 

Now the question arises; what do you do with all the work you had planned to do when the unexpected takes over your day? Well, if you are planning for the week, all it means is you reschedule what you wanted to do to some other time in the week. It’s likely you will have a few days to reschedule things over and you may be able to renegotiate some of your commitments.

A few years ago we had a family emergency that became apparent at 7:30am. I had a full day of work planned, yet this was family and I immediately took action to deal with the emergency. This essentially destroyed my plan for the day and the repercussions continued into the next day. However, I was able to sit down for ten minutes later in the afternoon and I messaged my appointments scheduled for the next day to tell them I was going to be unable to attend. I was then able to get back to the emergency. 

The most important thing is you deal with the issue in front of you first and once everything is back under control, you can review what you have on your plate and reschedule where necessary. 

Life is never going to be a straight line and no matter how well planned you are, things are going to go wrong. In a previous episode I spoke with Simon Jeffries, former UK Special Forces officer and Simon mentioned about when in the special forces you know before you begin things are not going to go according to plan. However, the important thing is to know precisely what you objective is and you stay focused on accomplishing that. Special forces soldiers do consider everything that could go wrong and what they would do in those situations, but the most important thing is they keep their eye on the objective. 

If you have ever seen the news footage of the the British SAS storming the Iranian Embassy in 1980, you may have seen one of the SAS soldiers getting caught in the rope he was descending on. His colleagues did their best to cut him down, but the mission still went on. They dealt with the emergency quickly and as efficiently as possible then got straight back to doing what they had planned to do.

It’s this approach we want to be bringing to our lives too. Things are not going to go according to plan. However, when you are clear about what must be done that day, you put yourself in a much stronger position because you are more focused and disruptions will just bounce off you. 

Now you don’t want to be setting yourself too many objectives. I only set myself one or two. I know that I will get those done 99% of the time. Yesterday was a very disrupted day, yet I had two things to complete. I needed to go to the bank and record and edit my YouTube video. My wife woke up feeling rather unwell, so I took her to the doctors. While she was there I realised I could call in to the bank, so I did that (there’s long queues at this time of the year to see a doctor). Once done at the bank, I picked my wife up from the doctors. 

I had to go to the pharmacy to get her prescription once I’d got her home and tucked up in bed. After a short sleep, my wife was feeling a lot better, so I was able to pick up the video recording and editing. There are other things on my list for the day, and a few of those I needed to reschedule, but when I finished for the day, I was surprised how much I’d actually got done. 

The important thing is not to panic. Accept the disruption for what it is, a disruption that needs to be dealt with then move back onto your objectives. Things will always calm down and return to normal, so there really is no need to panic. If meetings need to be postponed or cancelled, get on and do it as soon as you can. If planned work needs to be rescheduled, then do that. Just don’t overthink things. 

The great thing about having a plan for the week (because you did a weekly planning session) you have a plan to get back on to. This means no matter what disruptions that come your way, you only need a few minutes to review your plan and decide what still must be done and what can be renegotiated. 

In worst case scenarios, you may feel the need to do a weekly planning session to get yourself back on track. That’s okay. Sometimes that’s the wisest thing to. I think over the last year, I’ve had to do that once or twice. It’s not something you will need to do often, but if you feel that’s the only way you will get back on track, then by all means do it. You’ll feel a lot better and much more focused. 

I hope that helps, Sasha. Thank you so much for your question. 

It just remains for me now, to wish you all a very very productive week.