The Planner and the Unplannable

I'm a planner. I like to know what comes next. I like to prepare and be prepared. I also was not raised to just accept things as they are. If you want something to be different, you make a plan, you practice, and you make it better.

Here's the frustrating part. This works pretty spectacularly for 80% of the problem, but then there's that other 20% that includes factors outside your control. You want to become a better soccer player to make the travel team. You put the work in. You, in fact, get better. But so do other players and sometimes that's enough and sometimes it isn't. There are things you can choose, the pieces you can control and the ones you can't.

A friend of mine, my running buddy's husband, says, "You can choose your race, but you can't choose your race day." And when she and I are protesting that it is cold, icy, raining, too hot (insert other excuses here), we hear him and we support/ encourage/ drag each other and we go. (most of the time)

You can't plan for everything. 

You can put the work in, you can practice. You can plan and then you have to deal with the unplanned tasks. In just about every project management tool, there is a mechanism for accounting for the

unplanned events.  That is a little crazy to me that a tool entirely built around planning seems to recognize that a critical feature is the ability to account for the unplanned.  This is actually true in most products.  In fact,  QA teams spend a tremendous amount of time trying to dream up the unplanned or off target ways that we will use their products and anticipate what should happen.  And they get most of them and so they release the product but there are always a few that slip through. One of my favorites was last winter on one of the truly miserable days, that I got myself out for a run, my iPhone failed.  It shut off due to a temperature error at under 10°F and the screen displayed a high temperature message. Oh so close!

Now, there are two approaches here - you can assume no unplanned tasks and you will be wrong 100% of the time. You can try and anticipate every pitfall, circumstance and you will have fewer unplanned tasks but you will be late. Or, you can do your best to find the balance and have a team that knows how to roll with it.

When my kids were little and we were trying to figure out if we would ever get to go to a restaurant again, a friend of mine said. "Absolutely. You just need to be prepared to abort at any time."

And we don't live in a vacuum

We can't help but compare ourselves to the world around us. In some ways, this is great. In others, it is pressure. My son is finishing kindergarten. He's had a fantastic year. We can see how much he has learned and developed. But one night, he was upset and was talking about how he wished he was a stronger reader so that he could read longer and more complex books. And me, the planner, got straight to work. This is solvable. We'll get a list. We'll read more. But, wait - I already know how to read. This isn't my plan. I need to help him, I need to support him, I need to not make him crazy or afraid to tell me things that are upsetting him. This is so much more work than just making a plan and fixing it!

Two runners, only 1 poncho!

It was so much easier when it was my plan to build and execute against.  As a mom, as a manager, I'm not always the do-er anymore.  I have to plan and support by proxy. I have to give them the tools and the structure and the framework but I can't just fix it for them. And so even with the best laid plans, you can pick your race, but you can't pick your race day. So this Sunday, when I woke up to the pouring rain I got up and met my running buddy for our race day.