Saturday, December 7th, 2024- Hope For The Best, Plan For The Worst: What I Do NOW To Make The Unexpected Less Daunting

I am incredibly fortunate to be booked and busy. I am grateful for all of my wonderful reporters and other clients who have trusted me to help them complete their difficult and sensitive documents. That being said, having a full schedule often does not leave room for things to go horribly wrong. In hindsight, I should have been careful. In my life, something is always brewing and it will explode at any minute.

I got hit with some unexpected turmoil recently that sent a lot of things in my life into complete disarray. Obviously, I wasn’t prepared for it and found myself making a lot of compromises to my physical, mental, and emotional well-being to make things work. I didn’t miss my deadlines, thankfully, and the quality of my work did not suffer. But I endured a lot of sleepless nights, I was under stress, I was anxious, and I was not enjoying my work the way I normally do. I promised myself that when I got to the tail end of this thing, I’d figure out how to put in some safeguards to make sure I didn’t let myself get so overwhelmed next time something in my life goes haywire.

Today, I want to explain some of the things I’ve implemented to ensure I stay on track throughout my days and am able to maintain my work schedule, and my health, even when life decides to throw some screws in the machine.

Time Management Techniques

Time management remains your best defense against the unexpected. Since realizing I have ADHD, it has been important to me to manage my time, implement effective organization techniques, and maintain an environment where I feel comfortable and productive. However, when these unexpected curveballs came at me, I got anxious, stressed, and overwhelmed. All of my great plans and ideas were simply ineffective against it.

The best way I found to combat this was to become more hands-on. I decided to start practicing more active strategies, like a planning session in the morning over my coffee, to-do lists at night, and checking in throughout the day.

Morning Meeting

The planning session in the morning was the hardest to do. I don’t normally have enough time in the morning, since I usually wake up, make coffee, and jump straight into work. However, I found it left me a bit scrambled and unsure of how to manage all of the tasks I needed to accomplish throughout the day, especially when I was taking on extra responsibilities spilled over from my personal catastrophes.

Twenty minutes was all I needed.

I start waking up twenty minutes earlier now to give myself the time I need to plan my day. Sitting down over my morning coffee, I write in my planner the different tasks that need to be completed, assess the progress I’ve made on any long-term projects, evaluate how to continue on a positive trajectory, and create backup plans.

The backup plans are a necessity for keeping stress levels surrounding unexpected disasters down. I let my “everything will go wrong” brain go off for these few minutes, and identify what could reasonably happen to me throughout the day that would throw me off and stop me from achieving the goals I’ve set. Then, I plan for what I would do to stay on track in the event that those terrible things actually happen.

The amount of stress this has elevated cannot be quantified. It sounds so simple, “Plan how to handle your worst-case scenario.” But, admittedly, it didn’t always occur to me to do that in my everyday life where I wasn’t expecting things to go wrong. It only takes a few instances of everything going wrong to realize these backup plans are essential.

Check-ins throughout the day

Once I’ve made my plan for how I need to attack the day and be prepared for even the most unexpected catastrophe, it’s important for me to continually check in and evaluate how well I’m progressing. There are a lot of things that can go wrong or be miscalculated at the beginning of the day that need to be adjusted for later on. For example, it happens that tasks take longer than I expect them to, or that something forces a task to become a higher priority as the day goes on.

Because of this, I like to make sure I check in frequently throughout the day just to evaluate how much I’ve accomplished, what is left to do, what needs to be adjusted, and what could potentially wait until I have more time to complete it properly. This keeps me aware of what still lies ahead while being mindful of the time I have left to complete it.

To-Do List Each Night

It’s not enough for me to make plans in the morning. I need to go to bed with a clear idea of what needs to be delegated the next day. To do this, I like to sit down with myself at the end of every night, most of the time with a cup of tea, and start to evaluate what needs to be done. I look over what got pushed from the current day into the next one, the progress of my long-term projects, my current deadlines, and anything that came up throughout the day that needs to be dealt with later. Writing down this list of tasks helps me decide in the morning what needs to be a priority, what can be done in pieces over the course of the day, and what may need to be accommodated throughout the next day.

This list is a good setup for the next day of curbing the unexpected, but I also use this time to evaluate how I felt the current day went. I learned this technique from my sister, who has worked in very profitable and successful kitchens her whole life. She has always run those kitchens, and her ship is tight. This technique includes a well-organized system of evaluating herself and her staff in a way that encourages their positive and outstanding behavior while discussing what can be done tomorrow to fix any issues that have come up that day. She focuses on actionable results: what can I do tomorrow that actively fixes an issue I dealt with today?

I ask myself this question, and it helps me fix problems instantaneously. Complaining for the sake of complaining rather than fixing the issue has always bothered me, and I don’t like to be that kind of person. So, at the end of each day, I go through what happened, positive and negative, and how things may have been different than how I planned it. What went well? What did I do that I’m proud of? Give myself a compliment on how the day went. Then, the other side. What behaviors did I exhibit that I shouldn’t repeat tomorrow? Did I do anything that hindered my progress or caused a negative result? What is something that can be implemented tomorrow that either repairs this issue or prevents similar issues from happening in the future? What will I do differently if an issue such as this arises again?

It has to be actionable. I have to be able to put these solutions into effect immediately so they can be helpful, rather than simply an excuse to talk bad about myself.

Hard Stop

Next to the morning session, this has been the next hardest thing for me to do while attempting to curb the stress of the unexpected. When work piles up, deadlines are looming, then life hits you, it is very easy to decide to just work through the night and get it all done. I noticed how much I was sabotaging myself with this technique, however. It contributed to my anxiety, my short temper, and my lack of reasoning and problem-solving ability. I was setting myself up for failure not only the next day but for many days to come. This was one of those things that I knew would be a problem, but it always felt like getting the work done immediately so I didn’t have to worry about it later would be the one pro that outweighed the cons. It definitely didn’t. Getting the work done the next day rather than burning myself out allowed me to get the sleep I needed to attack the problem with much more fervor. I was able to complete it faster, better, and with much less anxiety.

All of these realizations made me understand that I needed to create and stick to this boundary of the Hard Stop. I decided that I would set a time frame that allowed for some destressing time in the evening, the time to do the nightly evaluation and to-do list, as well as the time in the morning to have coffee and my morning meeting. This was not an overnight implementation. It took a lot of hard pushing from my friends and myself to force myself into this hard stop. Convincing myself of the benefits took time, and forcing myself to see how I was negatively impacted needed to outweigh the instant gratification of making progress in the work overnight.

In Conclusion

That’s it. It seems pretty simple when I lay it out like that. Time management is the most effective defense against the unexpected. So, I’ve made my ability to manage my time much more efficient and constructive. I plan the fly and I fly the plan. I’ve seen a lot less stress since I’ve done this, and I feel a lot more prepared for when the inevitable wrench gets thrown into my machines.

I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did! If you liked this post or want to share your own experiences and tips, make sure to leave a comment down below. If you want to see more, check out the last post below or the previous posts on the blog. And if you’re interested in learning more scopist, proofreading, or transcription information, make sure to check back for a new post on the Next Step Scopist blog!

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