Category: planning

fixed flexibility

I’m slightly allergic to the following crap: follow these five steps so you, too, can have a magical morning. Activities such as reading, meditation or praying, working out all can make your morning more magical.

However, what none of these pieces of advice seem to entail are the more mundane things. What about washing up, eating, getting dressed, helping others in the household get dressed, traveling to work, the list goes on…

One of my biggest pieces of advice is; include a flexible component.

I find a plan to be only as good as its flexibility. Returning to the morning routine example. One of the activities on the planning should be; a wildcard. After all, you never know what’s going to happen. Suppose you are overcome with sadness due to the inability to complete all items on your list. What then is the purpose of the routine?

What’s true of morning routines is also true of businesses.

Taking the Pareto principle into account, include gaps, breathing space, or wildcards in your planning. Complement fixed components with flexible ones.

chief decision

Some people make decisions for a living. Yes, no, left, right, wait, proceed, increase, decrease. With every decision requiring thinking power and mental capacity, naturally, there is a limit to the number of decisions one can make on a given day.

CEOs showing up in the same outfit, year in year out, is no coincidence. Preserving thinking power for less mundane decisions seems like a smart move.

Whether it’s top CEOs or self-employed people just starting, with no one to make demands, balancing work and life is up to them. No one to impose a schedule, so even seemingly ordinary planning chips away at decision capacity.

planning flexibility

A plan is only as good as its flexibility. Without considering any shortcuts or detours, a plan can become obsolete in an instant.

Sometimes plan b should be plan a. What’s entrepreneurship if not tenacity and perseverance? If something comes up en route towards the goal, the route should be recalculated instantaneously, similar to a GPS.

Plans should contain fixed goals, but the trajectory should be changeable.