The blog

For you who pre­fer lis­ten­ing to read­ing, this post is also avail­able as an episode of the ​“Done!” pod­cast:

Hard­ly a house of cards

Earth­quakes are com­mon­ly recur­ring phe­nom­e­na in Japan and there­fore you might, there­fore, assume that Japan­ese hous­es would be built to stand firm and strong as the ground shakes.

Per­haps you already know that this is not the case. A reg­u­lar house risks crack­ing, break­ing, and crum­bling to pieces when the ground it is built on shakes vio­lent­ly. If it is instead able to ​”sway” with the motion of the earth, it stands a much bet­ter chance of still stand­ing when the earth stops mov­ing, and the earth­quake will have caused less destruc­tion and dev­as­ta­tion than it could have. This is why hous­es built to with­stand earth­quakes often stand on soft rub­ber feet that allow for more move­ment than reg­u­lar hous­es are built for.

The dan­gers of a rigid plan

When I read about this clever and inter­est­ing solu­tion, I imme­di­ate­ly start­ed think­ing about how it relat­ed to our struc­ture at work. If our struc­ture is too rigid, it will crum­ble and fall apart when some­thing unfore­seen hap­pens. If you plan every­thing you need to do in the cal­en­dar believ­ing that if you have set aside time to do it, it will get done (since struc­ture is all about plan­ning, right?), but not giv­en your­self a mar­gin for the unpre­dict­ed and tak­en into account all the unfore­seen things that might come your way, you will have set your­self up for fail­ure. As the ground beneath your feet moves, the struc­ture falls apart and becomes one big mess for you to sort out.

Try build­ing flex­i­bil­i­ty into your struc­ture instead so that it can with­stand a lit­tle shak­ing and mov­ing with­out falling apart.

How? Well, here is my suggestion.

Do this

Make your struc­ture more flex­i­ble and resilient by doing the following:

• When you block time in your cal­en­dar for work­ing alone on tasks you have to do, try giv­ing it a more gen­er­al and neu­tral head­line instead of spec­i­fy­ing exact­ly what you think you will do dur­ing this par­tic­u­lar stretch of time.
  
• Set due dates only when you real­ly need to set one (and hence leave most tasks with­out spe­cif­ic dates) instead of always and auto­mat­i­cal­ly assign­ing a date (which might eas­i­ly prove to be the wrong one) only because you can and the option to set one is avail­able in your to-do-list tool.
  
  
• Choose to only tag a select few tasks as ​”high priority”-tasks at a time (for instance, those you need to have fin­ished before you leave the office tomor­row after­noon) instead of fill­ing tomor­rows ​”must-have-time-for”-list with every­thing you would like to get done since many of these tasks are not actu­al­ly crit­i­cal­ly impor­tant and should there­fore not be tagged as such.
  
  
• Do some­thing else you can think of that cre­ates more air and space in your struc­ture. This will give you more room for deal­ing with all those things that undoubt­ed­ly will come your way that you did not see coming.

Make way for the unforeseen

If you build and cre­ate your struc­ture so that it is more flex­i­ble instead of too firm and rigid, it will become much eas­i­er for you to par­ry the unex­pect­ed twists and turns of every­day life. So, when the day that both looks and feels noth­ing less than a mas­sive earth­quake comes, you will be pre­pared to work around and through it with­out falling apart and still get what­ev­er you need­ed to do done.

What’s your way?

How have you made your struc­ture more flex­i­ble and pli­able? Write to me and tell me. I am very curi­ous to hear about your expe­ri­ences, hard-earned lessons, and what you did to pro­tect your struc­ture against the motions of dai­ly life. Email me and share your thoughts! 

(Speak­ing of plan­ning, here’s what you can use Microsoft Plan­ner for.)