From the course: Gretchen Rubin on Creating Great Workplace Habits

Strategy for success: Plan to fail

From the course: Gretchen Rubin on Creating Great Workplace Habits

Strategy for success: Plan to fail

- So the strategy of safe cards means that we should really try to anticipate failure. It can seem fatalistic to think about all the ways that you're going to mess up but it's very helpful. You want to think in advance about all the possibilities of how you might find something challenging or how something might be an obstacle to you keeping your good habit and really make a plan for it. You want to plan to fail, plan for failure. So let's say you've got a big report coming up at the end of the year. Say to yourself, well, I've been working pretty well. I've been having some really good work habits. I've made very good progress, but now the holiday season's coming up I'm going to be doing some traveling. There's going to be some changes in our office schedule. How's that going to play out? How am I going to keep my habit going even in the face of the holiday season? Or you break your leg. Well, okay. I've had this thing happen. I have to go to the doctor. I'm inconvenienced. I can't do things the way that I usually do. How am I going to make sure that I get my work completed anywhere? I need to think it through because my usual habits have been disrupted. I'm traveling, right? And this is a huge problem for a lot of people at work. You're like, well, I'm fine with my eating, with my productivity, with my sleeping, with a lot of different kinds of habits, but then I travel and then everything goes just to pot. So you've got to think, okay, how am I going to handle this when I'm traveling? Most people, they know pretty well what that travel schedule is going to look like. So how am I going to adapt? And it might not be the same habits. Maybe you need to adapt those habits for when you're traveling, but think it through so that you can really build in the habits that you want. Because the fact is, it can be challenging to stick to good habits. And we need to think about all the things that we can do, all the resources that we can bring to bear to make it as easy to follow those habits as possible.

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