Make your schedule more resilient

Layers of back-up options make life less stressful

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning,
This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's
tip is to make your schedule more resilient. By having
layers of backup should things go wrong, you limit the

(00:25):
amount of chaos in your life. Complexity and chaos are
not the same thing, and a resilient schedule is how
you can have one without the other. So I have
often heard people describe their lives as a circus. The
funny thing about that is that people are using this

(00:46):
metaphor wrong. When someone says my life is a circus,
they tend to mean it is chaotic, with unplanned things
happening all over the place. But an actual circus is
nothing like that. A circus is complex but orderly. No
one gets shot out of a cannon at the wrong time.

(01:08):
You can have eight motorbikes zooming around a metal sphere,
but you can bet that they are all going exactly
where they are supposed to go at exactly the right pace.
You'll also notice that the tightrope walkers and acrobats tend
to perform over a net. That is so if something

(01:29):
goes wrong, a mistake doesn't result in disaster. If you
have a complex life, there's a lot to learn from
that practice. You want to construct your schedule so that
things going wrong, as they often go wrong, doesn't result
in anything actually terrible happening. I have a lot of

(01:51):
moving parts in my life, and so I wind up
thinking about this all the time. For instance, I decided
this year that my five year old would take the
bus home from kindergarten as his default transportation. We live
close to the school and we still employ a full
time nanny, so theoretically she could pick him up every day.

(02:13):
But if the default was for a car to arrive
at the end of the school day every day, there
was just a little less give with this. Someone has
to meet the bus, but that someone could be anyone
over about thirteen years of age. They don't have to
be a licensed driver, so there's just a little more

(02:35):
resilience to the bus option. This actually wound up mattering
the other day when our nanny was on vacation. I
was at the airport getting on a flight, and my
husband was driving back from Maryland. He was supposed to
be back by the bus's arrival, but the time was
getting tight. Fortunately, my thirteen year old daughter was home

(02:59):
and was able to go down the hill to meet
the bus. As it turned out, my husband just made it,
but that resiliency made me a little less stressed as
I was getting on the plane. If you've got some
complex situation in your life, could you add another layer
of backup. If your kids are in daycare, you figure

(03:21):
out quickly enough that you will need a backup care
option for all those days that they will be homesick.
If you've got a tight connection on a flight, you
should check when the next flight is and whether it
will be possible to get on it. You might have
a backup meal option for Monday in case you don't
manage to make it to the grocery store on Sunday

(03:44):
because you are flying back from a trip and your
flight is delayed. At work, you might cross trained team
members on various functions so work never grinds to a
halt because John has Jerry duty. It would be lovely
in life if everything went as planned, but sadly, things

(04:07):
just don't. The other day we had another bus situation
that could have been a fiasco. I was at my
fifteen year old's cross country meet. My thirteen year old
daughter was at tennis practice. Our nanny was taking the
ten year old to pottery class after his bus dropped
him off, but his bus was so late that by

(04:27):
the time she grabbed him to take him to class,
she was risking not being home for the five year
old's bus. But fortunately, my husband was working from home
that day and had arranged to not leave for the
airport for his night flight until four thirty p m.
So we still had a layer of back up. He
met the five year old at the bus and all

(04:47):
was well. We simply have to expect that well things
will go wrong in life and build life with enough
resiliency that it just doesn't matter. A little mistake or
a small change doesn't result in disaster. With a resilient schedule,
that can be the case in the meantime. This is Laura.

(05:12):
Thanks for listening, and here's to making the most of
our time. Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've
got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at
Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast is a

(05:39):
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