A Little Planning Beats a Lot of Firefighting #1

A Little Planning Beats a Lot of Firefighting #1

Here’s a thing you could do:

  1. Starting on Monday and for 5 days, keep a record of how much of your time went into firefighting. Let’s say it was something like this:
DAYHOURS SPENT FIREFIGHTING
Monday1
Tuesday2
Wednesday3
Thursday8
Friday1
TOTAL15
AVERAGE PER DAY3
  1. Now – based on this evidence – you’re going to spend an average of 3 hours per day firefighting.
  2. So – plan on this basis:
  3. Clearly – based on this evidence – the dumbest thing of all to do would be to assume that next week, there’ll be no firefighting.
  4. When you build plans for projects, build in these 3 hours per day that you won’t be available to work on the project because you’ll be firefighting.
  5. When you make commitments, factor in these 3 hours per day that you won’t be available because you’ll be firefighting.
  6. And when somebody asks, ‘Why is it going to take you so long?” – tell them! Show them the numbers.
  7. You can continue to record this on an ongoing basis so that the predicted amount of time you’re going to spend firefighting becomes very accurate.
  8. You may notice seasonal trends.
  9. You may also start to wonder why this firefighting is happening in the first place and that will bring us nicely to what we’re going to talk about in the next post.