Welcome back! Hopefully you’ve had a fabulous beginning of July… and a fun time uprooting all the reasons that make you stay late in the office. Just as a reminder, we’re already seen that you spend long hours there because:

- You’re overworked, the powers that be wanting to get more done with fewer people (something we can’t do much about, except say no to extra tasks when our plate is already overflowing);

- You’re procrastinating

– You’re being a perfectionist, and it’s costing you time – You underestimate how long things take

There also is another cause for this “dis-ease”: Not planning for emergencies.

The fact is that you can’t

– predict when an emergency will come, or what this emergency will be; – forecast whether a routine task will suddenly run into an unexpected delay (someone you need an answer from is on vacation, for instance) ; – know ahead of time if you will get all the green lights or all the red lights on your way to work.

However, you can still factor those things happening when planning your day.

In other words, while you can’t know the timing and the nature of delays and emergencies, _you do know that delays and emergencies will happen in your day, and you can estimate how much time on average they take out of your day_.

How do you do this?

– Keep a log of all emergencies, unexpected delays and how long they took for a week or so. Once this is done, average the number of hours that they take every day. – Plan your day accordingly, by leaving this time open. For instance, if you saw that emergencies take on average two hours a day, plan you tasks and appointments as if your day was 6 instead of 8 hours. – The days where emergencies happen, you will be all set. The days when none happens, you have extra time to get ahead for the next day, do your professional reading, or any other task you had put on the back burner.

One of my mentors in this is my mother, a dentist: Her assistant leaves two appointment slots open every day, because my mother knows that, more often than not, she’ll get a couple of emergencies, such as a broken or painful tooth. When those emergencies don’t materialize, she uses that time to get caught up on her paperwork or read her medical journals. And she always feels calm and in control of her schedule.

When you start planning for emergencies, it transforms your day.

Yours in Daily Mastery,
Karin
www.DailyMastery.com