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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 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 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.
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 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 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.
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 13 years of age.
They don't have to be a licensed driver.
So there's just a little more 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 13-year-old daughter was home, and she 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 back-up?
If your kids are in daycare, you figure 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 because you are flying back from a trip and your flight is delayed.
At work, you might cross-train team members on various functions, so work never grinds to a halt because John has jury duty.
It would be lovely in life if everything went as planned, but sadly, things just don't.
The other day we had another bus situation that could have been a fiasco.
I was at my 15-year-old's cross-country meet.
My 13-year-old daughter was at tennis practice.
Our nanny was taking the 10-year-old to pottery class after his bus dropped him off.
But his bus was so late that by the time she grabbed him to take him to class she was risking not being home for the 5-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 430 pm.
So we still had a layer of backup.
He met the five-year-old at the bus and all was well.
We simply have to expect that 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.
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 lauravandercam.com.
Before Breakfast is a production of iHeart Media.
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