Once is an emergency

Too many crises means something is amiss

Life happens. Things go awry. We can all encounter the unexpected. The good news is that most people are understanding about true emergencies.

But the nature of emergencies is that they should be rare.

If life feels like a series of emergencies, and if everyday brings a new crisis, then as Laura Mae Martin, author of the book Uptime, has said, “look at the process.” It’s possible that if you reworked your systems, you could make life feel a lot more calm.

Planning wards off crises

For instance, one of the reasons I recommend planning each week before you’re in it is that you can see upcoming problems, and hopefully work around them. You’ll see something big is due on Friday, but you’ve committed to a lot of things in your personal life on Thursday. So you’ll need to carve out time on Tuesday and Wednesday to do your work in advance of your deadline. If you do that, there’s a much lower chance that you’ll find yourself frantically canceling things on Thursday because of this entirely foreseeable “emergency.”

These fake “emergencies” can happen all over the place. If you’re always hunting for your 6-year-old’s soccer jersey right before practice, and hence are always late, this is not an emergency. This is a systems problem. The jersey needs to be put somewhere in particular coming out of the wash, or if it can never be found in the wash, because the wash isn’t getting finished, that needs to be sorted out too.

If you’re always late for your Thursday team meeting at 11 a.m., that’s likely not because true “emergencies” are always happening Thursday at 10:45 a.m. It’s more likely that something in the schedule is problematic — like a client meeting scheduled at 10 a.m. that always runs over. You can keep hoping this will change on its own, but it probably won’t, so you need to figure out something else.

I’d point out that even in jobs that are known for emergencies, there are standard processes built in to limit last minute scrambling. Publications have pre-written obituaries for all major figures ready to go. All that needs to be filled in are the details of death and some quotes. Similarly, publications often have “evergreen” pieces that can move around depending on how much breaking news is happening. Most ERs are not going to be scrambling when they get a lot of flu cases in January. They have systems for dealing with expected seasonal spikes.

Unknown unknowns

Now to be sure, there are, as the saying goes, “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns.” A project getting delayed because of a lot of team members getting seasonal illnesses on top of several snow days in January could probably be anticipated. A project getting delayed because your office caught fire is somewhat of a different matter. You probably couldn’t have seen that coming.

But if you have an urgent need that keeps coming up, it might be worth seeing whether a systems change could reduce the drama in the future. Emergencies should be rare. If they’re not, then they’re normal — and probably not the normal you want.