A potential break
In December, for the first time (since we had spent quite a bit on our trip to Australia), Heather, my wife, said, “Why don’t we get each other Christmas presents this year?” Great idea, I thought, since I always find it quite difficult to buy from her and I hate shopping anyway. To be fair, Heather loves to shop and as said before, she is totally organized and she gets all the gifts for the whole family and the whole family, without me having to do a thing. The only person I have to shop for is Heather.
A dream for most men?
So her birthday is January 6th and after messing it up a couple of times in the first few years, I now get her birthday presents the week before Christmas along with her Christmas presents. Good planning, you might think, and yes, it works.
So no gifts last month brought the system down and that’s when everything could have gone terribly wrong. I didn’t buy her birthday gifts before Christmas thinking that there will be big sales this year and that I can get them on January 5th the day before. So I scheduled the afternoon off to go gift shopping and made sure I knew what she wanted. No problems so far.
For various reasons, I left work late and then rushed to the main shopping center in Watford, about a 30 minute drive away. No real traffic, no many people around, straight to the store to buy the ring she wanted. Excellent, this planning joke.
I give the clerk the piece of paper with the ring’s description and catalog number, and she goes to get it. When she comes back to him, I look at him and say, “Yeah, it looks good, it’s not on sale, but it’s okay.” The very friendly store clerk says something that sparks my thoughts for this post. “Yeah, it’s nice, we sold a lot of these and it’s the last one in stock.”
So my thoughts are that although I had planned to do it and thankfully it was done, I could have done it very poorly:
? What if they were sold out? I didn’t have time to go to another store.
? What if there had been a car accident and you couldn’t get to the stores on time?
? That if I had forgotten my wallet or my credit card had not worked (I have a few in this one)
With only one gift to receive this year, how could he have faced her on her birthday without a suitable gift?
So despite planning for it, having reminders in place, and working perfectly, what I hadn’t done was have any contingency plans. I almost caused an upset because I had left it until the last minute and hadn’t let anything go wrong!
Now, this may all sound obvious, but let’s be honest: how many of us leave things to the last minute? In fact, the purpose of setting deadlines on goals and projects is that we are guilty of this too often. Then if it goes wrong, we say, “Oh, the train was late, I ran into traffic, someone else didn’t do what they should have done.” Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me. There really is no excuse that we kept our word or not.
If we really cared about keeping our word and therefore our integrity, we would make sure to plan for the unexpected.
What I learned
Always do it early if possible, as you never know what the last minute will bring.
Always have a plan B and potentially a plan C
Planning is not done unless both of the above have been adequately addressed.
What do you think?
How do you make sure you plan correctly, even taking into account the unexpected?