It’s incredibly rare for me to schedule a business meeting on a weekend. As a matter of fact, I’ve only ever had one other weekend business meeting, and it came at a significant cost to my client. I value my time off, and you’re going to pay extra if you encroach on my weekend down-time.
Nevertheless, I received a phone call Friday night that necessitated a Saturday morning meeting. We planned to meet at 8am Saturday morning in Vancouver. For those of you who don’t know, that’s a 30-minute drive without traffic for me. Considering that I’m just getting over a cold and screwed up my sleep schedule by staying up for Avatar Friday morning, waking that early on Saturday would absolutely require an alarm.
So I set my faithful alarm clock to 6am and hit the sack a bit early. I made sure to unwind with some good music before I went to sleep, and I had a remarkably restful night. One of my best in years, actually. So when I woke up fully refreshed without an alarm I was excited.
Until I rolled over and saw “7:11” staring back at me in big red numbers.
Yes, I set my alarm for 6am. I just forgot to turn it on.
A few quick scrambling minutes later found me shaved, showered, and in the car with clean clothes on and a piece of toast in my stomach. Amazingly, I managed to make it to my morning meeting by 7:59 – and even beat my clients there as well!
My point, though, is that no matter how well-thought out your plan may be, life can always throw a wrench in the gears. As one of the best writers of our time put it, “the best laid plans o’ mice and men often go awry.” So make sure that when one of your plans inevitably fails (not all plans are destined to fail, but you must accept that there always exists such a possibility) you either have a back-up plan or a way to circumvent the repercussions of that failure.
In my case, I called a colleague who was also on his way to the meeting and told him I was running late and he might need to start without me. Thankfully I made it on time, but he was prepared to step in on his own should I have missed my window.
What steps do you take to avoid plan failure? What do you do when a plan does fail?
