How do you over-book yourself, while keeping space in your calendar?

Image by intographics from Pixabay

One thing that I have clearly noticed as a self-employed consultant is that you always need to over-book yourself. Because even if your schedule is at 125%, things get cancelled, deadlines are moved, and most of the time, my 125% schedule becomes 100%. This has worked fine for me for the last year. However, you also need to allocate time for unforeseen events, which runs contrary to the above statement. Your kid might get sick, your dog needs veterinary treatment or urgent mistakes come to the surface with your clients. These instances may bump your 125% schedule up to 200% if they coincide. These past weeks has been some of the worst ones so far. And it traces back to problems about a month ago. So, what can I do to avoid similar workload explosions?

Here’s an important lesson I have learned on the motorcycle racetrack. If you are having problems with a specific corner that you just can’t “get right”, chances are that the problem is not this corner, but instead the cause lies three corners before. The entry speed is often a critical factor. If you enter the corner too fast, you will be struggling and cannot give throttle until you are out of the corner. That means many valuable seconds lost on lap time. However, if you backtrack and reverse-engineer the problem, you might find that the cause lies in excessive entry speed three corners before. When riding a powerful motorcycle, it is often advantageous to enter a corner slowly, fling the bike around and give it full throttle as soon as possible, with a racing line resembling a V-shape. If the entry speed is too high, the line becomes a U instead. Or a crash. On one of my favorite tracks, the key is to enter a hairpin at very slow speed that feels like a stand still. But that translates into taking the following corner at full throttle! Many other riders take the hairpin too fast and consequently go slow through the next corner that can be taken very aggressively. But they can’t because their entry speed is too high.

This racetrack analogy might be useful for me when balancing the parent and consultant role on a knife edge. I got over-burdened this past week, but I am pretty sure it traces back to some sick days I had to take with my son a couple of weeks before. I never really recovered from that, having 2-3 days simply removed from the calendar. And here lies the solution. I hadn’t planned for those sick days. No parent can honestly claim that they weren’t expecting a sick day with their kid. Kids get sick, it’s a fact of life. I got a tip on a vlog I made the other day on this topic that you can allocate time slots for the unforeseen events – which are indeed very foreseeable – and if nothing happens, just use them for normal chores. But you need to be strict. And you need to place numbers on it.

It just hit me that I need to approximate how much of my time is eaten up by sick days and other urgent matters. To do that, you need to keep a daily journal. If I just knew how many sick days (or similar) there are in a year, all I have to do is to open my calculator and determine how many hours this translates into every work week. And voila, there you have your “holy” time slots for foreseeable unforeseen events. Another racetrack analogy comes to mind. To go faster and safer, you must raise your eyes above the horizon and trust your peripheral vision. If you can’t see where you are going, you will most certainly not muster the courage to open full throttle to get there. Our defensive survival mechanisms tell us we should do the other way around. Look into the ground in front of you. That’s where the threats are. But then you can never ever open full throttle either. Lift your eyes, trust your peripheral vision, and you will avoid all threats long before they even occur.

This blog post has reminded me how useful analogies can be between completely different disciplines. I have more of the motorcycle analogies on tap, but we’ll save them for another day.