3 Keys Thursday: 3 Key Choices for Dealing with Interruptions

If there's one thing the past few months have made abundantly clear, it's that the best-laid plans don't always work out. On Sunday night, I laid out my goals for the week and then, last night, on the eve of what was scheduled to be a flexible work day, I made a list of tasks to accomplish.

Yeah, that didn't happen.

While I still have some time left today to make progress on those goals, being far from where I expected to be at this point in the day got me thinking about what our options are when our best-laid plans rise up and take off in an unexpected direction. We can:

• Go with the flow. Today's to do list got knocked off-course by two meetings that lasted much longer than expected, erasing a chunk of the work time I thought I'd have available. But, since the meetings offered valuable information and connection with colleagues, I opted to stay in the meetings and re-schedule the work. When the second meeting ended, I took a deliberate break, took stock and dug into the to-do list item that rose to the top for me in terms of both importance and motivation.

• Get back on course. I could have excused myself from either meeting, but chose not to. Had I opted to exit the meeting(s), I could have checked my list, adjusted my time frames, and gotten started on the work I'd planned to do. Given the fact that I was already off-schedule, I'd need to make adjustments in either the number of items I tackled or the amount of time I spent on each, but I could have honored most of my to-do list.

• Do a little bit of both. One of my colleagues in the first meeting needed to leave before an important part of the meeting, and she asked if it would be recorded. That way, she could stay true to her schedule and view the recording later, getting most of the best of both worlds. I say most of the best because doing both fully is rarely a realistic option. Though she could see the video, she couldn't participate in the discussion but, had she stayed, she'd have missed an appointment so, in her case, staying was not an option. This sort of trade-off is typical when we try to do everything; in addition, it often involves more of a time commitment as well. As long as we're okay with both of those limitations we can sometimes do it all. Sort of.

No one of these options is the right one for every situation. Had I had a meeting scheduled with someone besides myself, I would probably have gone for the third option rather than the first (and honoring our commitments to ourselves is another blog post entirely). Had the down side of staying in the meeting outweighed the benefits of staying put, I would probably have gone with the second choice.

Dealing with the demise of our best-laid plans is a fact of life. Some of us have personalities that allow us to do this seamlessly, while others are so thrown by the change in plans that getting back on course is all-but impossible. Understanding that we have options, though -- that we can choose which action to take based on the circumstances, our personalities, and a host of other factors -- is an important tool in our time management arsenal. 

Today, I opted to stay. As a result, tomorrow's schedule will most likely be light on commitments where I relinquish a degree of control over my own time because I will want to catch up on the tasks I didn't complete today. Time management must, like time itself, include a certain amount of fluidity because life itself is unpredictable and the harder we try to grasp time, the more easily it slips away. 

Or so it seems.