How To Plan Your Week During An Emergency

How To Plan Your Week During An Emergency

I have a hectic week coming up, and the worst part is that I’m not entirely sure what’s going to be happening, where I’ll have to be and so on.

People have a tendency to, when hit with unexpected things; the car is broken, a family member is sick and needs help, an unexpected hospital trip or tooth cavity or whatever; rely on their powers of improvisation.

This, rather than helping, can lead to a bunch of decisions that wind you into more stressful situations than fewer, and, importantly following the theme of the last few weeks’ worth of posts, lead to your mood crashing due to decision fatigue at critical times.

So that’s why I’m doing the following…

Control What You Can

Let’s say you unexpectedly have to look after a family member who is sick.

There’s a lot you can’t control, and at various times in our life, we’re in the lap of the gods and you have to square with that. This is where having a good idea of where you sit on stoicism, fatalism and/or the various theological bits come in helps.

However, hold it in Marcus Aurelius; for the most part, even when life is throwing us around in a maelstrom, there’s a lot you can control.

So… back to our hypothetical family member. They’re going to be sick, but you don’t know how, why or the extent to which that is the case. You’re probably going to have to take them food and look after them but maybe they won’t be hungry and/or maybe they’ll need help getting out of bed, and so on.

It’s important here to split the can controls from the can’t controls.

• You can probably plan your own stuff in advance
• You can make them food that they may or may not eat
• And you can make arrangements to visit them as your schedule allows

Those are the cans and I’ve worded the last part because it’s not always as easy for everyone as, “take the day off work and become a carer.”

I’m going to focus specifically on the first because that’s where we can always can and it makes a lot of difference.

Plan Your Week

There’s a phrase that goes, “a stitch in time saves nine.”

On the surface, it suggests that if you fix a problem when it’s small, it doesn’t become a larger one.  I’ve been talking a lot about decision fatigue, and apply it here now.

“A decision now saves many later.”

This applies a lot to situations where you’re doing the regular stuff. I currently have five major writing projects on the go, (and yes, there’s the Vault – news on that to follow Soon™) that I know I need to work on.

In any given week, I have to work on those. I also have to do all the life stuff; I’ve written recently about meal prep, exercise and health stuff, and there are the family commitments and social commitments and whatnot as well.

Those are the things you have to do. If you have kids, they need to get to school. That means you’re not working on anything between 8:30-9:30 as you do the school run. (For example.)

It’s best that you plan for these things, even if it’s every day stuff and you know it’s Monday morning and your kids have to be at school for 8:50am and you know you’re going to get stuck in traffic at the same roundabout as always.

It’s important to add it to your plan because we’re going to get complicated a little here.

Systems Thinking

Everyone’s got a system until stuff goes wrong. Then you’re just hopelessly behind on your to-do list.

But the simple difference between a crappy to-do list you’ll never complete because life gets in the way, and a working system that helps you rather than makes you feel lazy despite being on your feet for twelve hours, is a simple case of taking that to do list and saying, “What if?”

You’ve got a list of things to do, and hopefully, there’s some sort of timing.

Kids need to be dropped off at 8:50am. What if you’re busy with the sick relative from above?

That’s a hard question to answer, but it’s the right question to ask; can someone else take the kids to school? If so, is it worth putting that hypothetical into the world with a simple phone call?

What if you have to stay overnight with the sick relative? That’s a very complex chain of events (and also another reason to be a prepper; you’ve got an overnight bag ready at all times, haven’t you?)

Simply by having your timetable, schedule or plan open and asking, “what if this can’t occur like I intend?” opens your brain up to tackling common problems and shrinking those things that are “out of your control” down to their real size, as opposed to the perceived size you imagine when you allow yourself to get pulled into something unprepared.

If you do this, even for a little set of items and possibilities, you’ll find the lap of the gods is far smaller than you thought.

I’ll leave you with that; I have some planning to do.