“Why am I constantly feeling behind schedule?”
Despite the best efforts, scheduling doesn’t seem to work, especially for family.
Why is that?
You wake up later than you planned. You hit that snooze button a couple of times. Your child doesn’t wake up on time. Breakfast has be eaten in the car because you are running late. You barely made it to drop off your child, and you are heading to work. Your meeting runs late, and your colleagues stopped by your desk, and you staying at work later than expected. When you walk in the door, your children is running around the house. Your children don’t want to go to bed and you stayed up to tuck them in. Then you tried to check a few emails that you didn’t get to, and the day is over.
This is especially frustrating if you are the type of person who plans out their day, and you just can’t seem to catch up with your plan. Or you already gave up, waiting for the day to take you where it wants to take you.
Why is that?
Why is scheduling so difficult?
Perhaps it is because we have the wrong lens to look at our lives. What if everything we learn about productivity, scheduling, and the way we organize life is based on the wrong assumption? The assumptions that our lives would run smoothly without interruptions?
The expectation we have that everything will run smoothly is the reason why we:
schedule back-to-back hour-long meetings.
planning to leave the house based on map apps’ prediction of travel time.
underestimate the amount of time it requires us to complete a task.
start cooking a meal based on the prep time written on recipes.
The assumptions that everything will go accordingly to expectation failed to take into the account external circumstances and human factors.
You grew dependent on consistency, and take it for granted. You expected that the power will always be on, the water will always be running, the weather can be predicted up to ten days out, and you will have the same amount of energy throughout the day. The comfort in these factors tricked you into believing that the world operates on a schedule.
Then there are human factors. Your spouse may encounter something at work that delayed the plan you have together. Your children may be in a bad mood and refuse to cooperate with you. Your boss gave you responsibility you weren’t expecting, and your colleagues ask for favor. You can’t control other people, and how their decisions may impact your life.
With these two factors, how can anyone plan their life down to the minute? Maybe your life is perfect, but I am willing to bet that it usually isn’t what you expected.
You need to look at scheduling as a living thing. Somethings that grows and evolve over time. To help it to be strong, you have to provide a climate and an environment that is conducive to growing.
Here are some ways to build in some flexibility to your schedule:
Schedule “flexible blocks.: Block off a few times throughout your week for “flexible blocks,” where you use it to complete tasks that weren’t done when you make a schedule.
Create space between commitments. Give yourself 10-15 minutes between meetings so you can grab water, use the restroom, or answer an urgent text message that showed up during the meeting. Give yourself some time to breath and adjust your day as you see fit.
Use a To Do list when scheduling tasks that takes less than half an hour instead of a schedule. In each day, write down a list of things you would like to accomplish, then rank them. Throughout the day, whenever you have a moment, start going down the list. So you don’t accidentally fill a block of time with not so important task. You also avoid the pain of being tied to the number of minutes to complete a task, rather than evaluating if you are completed with the task or not.
Use the 2x rules. However long you think you will do something, double that. Chances are you are underestimating the difficulty of the task and you are overestimating your ability to complete the task in the set amount of time.
when you can see your life as a living organism, you have more chance to adapt and change as an organism, rather than a factory that runs everything by schedule and discounting unpredicted circumstnaces and human factors.
The lens you put on to see yourself will have a sigfniciant impact in your family, in your child’s education, and in your jobs.
More blogs posts are coming to see how scheduling impacts home, school, and work in upcoming posts.
