Budgeting for The Unexpected

Our expectations set the tone for our workday.

They create a lens through which we view and respond to everything that happens throughout our day.

And each morning, we establish a set of expectations about what we’ll be able to accomplish, how long it will take, and how we want our day to unfold.

As we’re establishing those expectations, we tend to rely exclusively on things we can identify at that particular moment in time: projects we know we must complete, meetings we know we must attend, people we know we must contact.

But what we often fail to account for is something that always shows up in our workday: The Unexpected.

Things like new work, delays, or fire drills that we don’t know about yet - but that we can realistically say from experience will be part of our upcoming workday.

And when The Unexpected does arrive - as it almost always does - it doesn’t align with our expectations and ends up ruining the vision we had for what our day would look like.

Think about this: how often do you come into a day thinking it will go one way, and then just a few hours later it looks completely different?

This happens to us all the time and is the source of consistent frustration and anxiety.

Yet we still set our expectations for the day without accounting for The Unexpected.

Try this:

Start by adjusting your expectations.

First, as you make plans for the day, acknowledge that your day probably will not go exactly the way you envision - and know that it’s ok if it doesn’t.

Instead of trying to control the way you spend every minute, start your day by shifting your expectations to a place where you expect that your day will be impacted from the start.

Second, adjust how you plan for your day with an eye towards budgeting for The Unexpected.

In other words, leave space in your day for things you don’t know about yet but that you can anticipate, from experience, will enter it at some point.

Rather than trying to figure out how to pack more into your day, set aside pockets of time that are reserved specifically for The Unexpected. Plan fewer things back to back. Leave time unaccounted for.

Here’s what will happen when you do this:

If The Unexpected does arrive, you’ve already prepared for it and it’s less likely to have a significant impact on your mindset.

Or, if you’ve planned for The Unexpected and it never arrives, you’ll feel like you’ve been gifted a valuable window of time.

In either case, you’ll be managing your expectations instead of letting them manage you.

Go have a great workday.