How to Protect Your Most Important Work When Everything Goes Off Plan

The legendary American Football coach, Vince Lombardi, said: “It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up."

Now that’s true in American Football, and it’s also true in life.

No matter how well you plan your day or your week, your plan will inevitably get attacked by outside influences.

A disorganised, reactive boss, a tired son or daughter who won’t get out of bed in the morning, a traffic jam on the way to an important meeting, or your accountant telling you that you need to pay a big tax bill.

These are all sudden, impossible to plan for attacks on your carefully planned day.

Having a plan is one part of a productive day. Having an arsenal of tools to defend your plan is another. And it’s that part that most people never prepare for.

In this week’s episode, I will share with you a few ideas that will help you defend your plan and show you how to get back on track if you are prevented from following it through.

Let’s go.

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Script |425

Hello, and welcome to episode 425 of the Your Time, Your Way 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.

Whenever I ask a client how their week went, most answers are negative.

They usually go something like:

“Well, it started well. I got everything I wanted done on Monday and Tuesday completed, but then I had to suddenly go out to see a customer on Wednesday morning, and that just threw me off track. I didn’t get back to the office until 4ish, and then I had to report back to my boss. That went on until 6:00 pm. Argh! It was a disaster”

Well, was is a disaster?

Perhaps not. All it was was one day out of five that did not go as planned.

It’s possible that a day like this will have put you behind on your plan for the week. It could also mean that getting everything you want done that week will no longer be possible. But that does not necessarily mean it’s become a disaster.

The issue really is not preventing things from going wrong; that would be a challenge beyond almost everyone. Instead, the focus should be on recovering from an unexpected event or interruption to minimise the damage to your plan.

And in this week’s episode, I will share a few ideas to help you quickly get back on track after one of these inevitable, unexpected events.

But before I do that, I’d like to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question, but sadly, once again, she’s sunning herself in a resort somewhere, so I’m afraid it’s me reading out the question again.

This week’s question comes from Will. Will asks, “ Hi Carl, I’ve finally become consistent with my weekly planning (thank you for the tip about doing it on a Saturday morning). My problem now is when I look at my plan at the end of the week, I’ve got practically none of it done. There’s always some emergency that throws me off my plan. How do I get myself to stay on track?”

Hi Will,

Thank you for your question.

Now, the first thing I would tell anyone is not to go for perfection. If you have ten things that you plan to get done over the next seven days but only manage to do seven, I would say that was a pretty good week.

You did seven important things that you wanted to do. That’s a 70% success rate. I’d take that.

The reality is you are unlikely to ever hit 100%. I know I never have; in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who has.

There are just too many things that can happen that will throw you off track. Plus there’s the human side of things too.

We often expect to be able to do far more than is possible, and then there’s always a missing piece of information that you need to ask someone else for, and they are away all week at a conference and won’t be able to send it to you until next week.

There could be a proposal you submit, anticipating approval, only to have it sent back to you for adjustments that will then require resubmitting.

None of these can be anticipated; building in some buffer time can help, but it’s still not likely to give you a 100% success rate.

If you are hitting 100% consistently, that’s likely to suggest that you are not pushing yourself hard enough to develop, but that’s a whole different story.

One trick I often suggest to my coaching clients is to build in a “catch-up” afternoon, or, if you can, a “catch-up day”, later in the week where you avoid scheduling meetings or other commitments and keep it free for catching up on anything you may have fallen behind with.

For example, I don’t schedule anything on a Thursday afternoon. I often have meetings mid-morning (I think of it as a calls day), and one task: writing this script.

Other than that, there’s nothing. This means that if I am behind on anything, I have a whole afternoon to catch up. (There’s always something I will be behind on) This week, I am behind on a few videos I want to record. Should have got them done yesterday, but I ran out of time. So, this afternoon I will be recording.

Another tip is to look at your weekly plan not as a task-level plan, but as a set of objectives. In other words, plan for bigger things such as making progress on a project, getting four exercise sessions in, clearing a backlog or resolving an issue with a customer.

This is a reason why I developed the Weekly Planning Matrix. It’s four squares representing four areas of your life:

Core work: the work you are employed to do. (Just as an aside here, if you’re a part of my Learning Centre, last week’s Learning Note has an excellent example of how Warren Buffett identified his core work)

Projects and issues: these are the higher-level things you want to make progress on professionally.

Personal: For things that need addressing in your personal life, such as scheduling a doctor’s appointment, deciding how many exercise sessions you will do, etc.

And finally, the radar, which is for things you do not need to do anything about but should be aware of. For instance, if your in-laws are coming round for a few days later this month, or you’re waiting for a package to be delivered.

Because you’re limited for space in each square, you become mindful about trying to do too much. If your projects and issues square is full, and next to that you see all your core work tasks, you will instantly see if you are being over-optimistic about what you can get done that week.

I’ll leave a link to a video I did on doing the Weekly Planning Matrix in the show notes for you.

The next idea is related to your daily planning.

Because it is almost inevitable that an unexpected event will occur at some point during the week, your daily planning can be used to reassess your weekly plan.

Let me give you an example from my week this week. I planned to record some additional videos on Tuesday, but when I went to set things up, I discovered that the local government had decided Tuesday was a great day to dig up the road right outside my office. Jackhammers, reversing vehicle warning beeps, and road cleaners were all in full operation. It was an orchestra of wonderful modern city life noise

That plan had to be scrapped. So, I looked at my calendar and saw that Thursday afternoon was clear (it always is, remember, for catch-up), so I moved the time block to Thursday afternoon.

Now, I did that calendar adjustment as soon as I realised I wasn’t going to be able to record the videos, but I could easily have left it until later in the day, when I did my daily planning.

That’s why your daily planning is so useful. It allows you some time each day to step back, reassess your plan for getting the important things done and make any alterations based on the new information you have.

And that brings me onto the timing of your daily planning.

Time and time again, when one of my clients switches over to planning their day the evening before, they tell me that it was life-changing.

It’s life-changing because you will immediately discover your evenings are more relaxing. Once you’ve planned the day, your brain lets go of all the stuff you’re feeling a little anxious about. It quietens down.

You also find you sleep better because you know what you will be doing the next day and that all your “bases” are covered, so to speak. No more “oh Crikey. I forgot to do X” just as you’re drifting off to sleep.

And when you begin your day, you’re already clear about what needs to be done. That gives you a tremendous amount of focus and prevents you from going looking for trouble by looking at your actionable email, sifting through Slack or Teams messages or going into Jira looking for open tickets.

Now, I know all that’s well and good, but what happens if one of these legendary Unexpected Events happens when you’re in the middle of doing your most important work for the day?

This is the proverbial Vince Lombardi’s “getting knocked down” situation. And as Vince Lombardi says, it’s all about getting back up again once you’ve been knocked down.

The only thing I’ve found that works here is that once you’ve dealt with the Unexpected Event, pause. Yes, that’s right. Stop.

Just briefly. Look at your calendar and see when your next committed appointment is, and take a look at your prioritised task list and see what’s left to do.

Often you will find that now that you no longer have the time you thought you would have, some of the remaining tasks can be rescheduled to another day.

You may need to send a quick message to someone who is expecting something from you, but what you want to be doing is resetting your priorities based on the time you have left.

For those of you who wisely set aside time to deal with your actionable emails and messages, you could reduce the time you spend there. For instance, if you have an hour protected for admin and communications later in the day, cut it to 30 minutes.

Remember, with things like messages and emails, one is always greater than zero. Giving yourself thirty minutes today means you’re not going to have to find an extra hour tomorrow.

What was that old proverb, “a stitch in time saves nine”? Something like that.

I would add an extra tip here. Something I’ve found very helpful. That is to reassess your prioritised task list between each session of work.

Emails and messages, for example, can be devastating to even the best-laid plans. Given that most of us check our messages between sessions of work anyway, there’s always the danger that you’ll find an Unexpected Event” that requires thirty minutes or so of your time.

So, give yourself a few minutes away from your desk and mentally re-evaluate your plan for the day. Be comfortable switching things around. For example, if you have to attend an unplanned meeting after lunch, you may find that moving your communication and admin time forward will reduce any pressure you may feel after the meeting.

So there you go, Will. I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening.

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