Last week we talked about taking your coffee black, enjoying the simple things, keeping balance and a SIMPLE process to setting & achieving a goal. (Read it here)

To recap:

• Set a goal – make it attainable, defined and give it a deadline. Don’t give yourself a marathon to run when you’ve never done a 5K.
• Outline the steps to achieve that goal. Give yourself daily activities toward success.
• Define your success – what will it mean to be successful?

We left off acknowledging that it’s okay to fall off course. Pick up the piece and get back on your plan. But how do you make up lost time or incorporate the lost time in your new plan? What’s your escape plan to get out of the derailment?

Let’s take a look at a hypothetical scenario…

You have created a plan for drafting 2 months of blog articles ahead of time to get you time to enjoy the holidays with your family and not digging into your articles day and night. Over a 4 week period, you decided to write your current two blog articles each week as well as 4 additional drafts. You created a calendar from October 13 through November 17 to create 16 drafts in addition to your 8 full blogs. This sounds like a LOT. It can be daunting, but you know it’s possible, especially if you plan and tackle it systematically.

Your plan to tackle this systematically may look something like this:

On Thursday October 24, you catch the stomach bug and it has you down and out for 5 days. This sucks. You’re behind on your blog, you’re behind on you drafts and you have plans this holiday season to travel and visit family, go caroling, and decorate like the griswolds… but how do you catch up?

This is where an escape plan comes in handy. Your original plan gave you November 18 through Jan 13 “off”. And I say “off” because you’re not necessarily free from work efforts, but limited to allow more time with family. With your 5 lost days you need to look at a few options:

• Can you take 5 days from the front of back of your time “off”?
• Can you bury the 5 missed days into your remaining 2 weeks? That’s 3-4 drafts and at least 1 additional blog post to publish ASAP?
• Do you simply skip the blog post you missed while sick?
• Can you restructure your blog schedule for Nov/Dec/Jan to account for the drafts you didn’t make it to?

Which of the above can you make work and not impact your presence, influence, etc.

—-

The key to all this, is NOT giving up on what you planned because something didn’t go right. Getting sick is a common and easy to explain scenario, but any number of things could have gone wrong here. You’ve got this, you’re in control of your fate, you just need to put your nose to the grindstone and keep your head high while you work through the hurdles thrown at you.

If you’re in a rut, fallen off course, or just need a push in the right direction, drop a line and I’d be happy to chime in on any ways to turn the situation in your favor.