How to Adapt to Interruptions in Your Schedule

How To Adapt to Interruptions in Your Schedule

You’ve optimized your schedule to get the most out of your time. (I’m imagining your color-coded calendar and prioritized to-do list—it’s a beauty!) You’ve removed distractions and enforced boundaries to stay on track (“No is a complete sentence,” you say as you repel their intrusions). But what do you do when there’s interference you can’t avoid? In that moment, you need a plan for how you’ll adapt to interruptions in your schedule.

Unfortunately, you’re probably not so hot at adaptation. Research by Erich Dierdorff suggests that adaptation skills are as critical as other time management skills (awareness and arrangement) but less common. That is a problem because being good at adaptation is the best predictor of how well you prioritize your activities.

Let’s review a few common interruption scenarios and consider the tactics to help you adapt your schedule and get back on track.

When You Need to Adapt Your Schedule

First, let’s admit that our beautiful schedules with tasks wrangled into time-boxed time blocks are often delusions based on what we hope to achieve rather than what we can deliver. We’re just not great at predicting how long an activity will take.

This is known as the “planning fallacy.” It turns out that when it comes to predicting how long it will take to do something, we don’t learn from experience and persist in being over-optimistic. In the workplace, these scenarios are common reasons why our time estimates are off:

A Task Takes Longer Than Expected. It seemed like you could knock off a proposal in 30 minutes, but your timer just beeped, and you’re only halfway done.It’s More Complicated Than You Thought. As you start to work on the stakeholder management plan, you learn about new issues that will expand the scope of the work.An Urgent Task Upends Your Priorities. You thought you would have the afternoon to sort out a new plan with the supply chain team, but now a shipment is missing, and you need to track it down first.You Have to Wait on Something From Someone Else. You’re raring to go, but the data you need to be able to build the presentation has yet to appear in your inbox.You’re Missing Something You Need to Complete the Task. You have most, but not all, of the information you need to build the forecast, but last quarter’s actuals aren’t ready yet.

What other schedule-smashing scenarios did I miss? Let me know in the comments so I can expand the list.

Core Strategies to Adapt After a Schedule Interruption

If we assume that one of those scenarios will negate your Monday morning plan by Tuesday afternoon, what can you do to get back on track? These approaches will help:

Schedule Buffer and Contingency Time

Ok, I’m cheating here because this is a scheduling strategy that belongs in my article about scheduling strategies. Still, it’s one of the best adaptation approaches, so it’s worth mentioning here. If you’ve built your schedule to include buffers around most tasks (e.g., assuming 45 minutes of work but not starting your next block until 60 minutes), you’ll have a 25% slush fund you can borrow from.

Similarly, if you’ve held a couple of contingency blocks in your week in which you’ve programmed nothing, you can use those to make up lost time. These small windows are not only great for your tasks that are taking longer than anticipated but also as a place to channel any requests of your time from colleagues.

Scale Back the Output

When you’ve found that a task is taking longer than expected, one option is to shrink the job by working toward a less ambitious outcome. If you’d planned to connect with six customers as part of an outreach, would four be sufficient? If you mock up a presentation, could you stick with the text and not include graphics for the first-round review?

Before you constrict your work, take a moment to consider whether changing the output will have a meaningful impact on the outcomes. If not, if a less ambitious version will still deliver roughly the same value, scale back.

Seek Efficiencies

Sometimes, you can’t scale back the output, but you can get there more efficiently. If I have all the time in the world to write a post, I submerge myself in Google Scholar and spend a couple of hours reading primary research before I write the first word. If I’ve had a schedule interruption and have to write something quickly, I start by reading articles where the author has already summarized the research, or I fire up ChatGPT. These techniques focus my attention so I can surgically dip into primary research.

What opportunities do you have to work more efficiently? Is there a YouTube video that would help you build spreadsheet reports more quickly? Could you take shortcuts in some areas that wouldn’t affect the quality of the final product? If you’re trying to write more efficiently, the secret is to write at full speed and edit later. If you want to push it, The Most Dangerous Writing App asks you to set the minutes you’ll write for and deletes all of your work if you stop typing before then. Gone. Lost. Irretrievable. That should get your efficiency up!

Swap the Order

If you planned to be doing a task that you can’t accomplish at the moment (maybe you have no inspiration or you’re waiting on someone else to get you the raw materials you need), letting go of your original plan and moving to something later in your day or week might do the trick. This might be another work task or, alternatively, something non-work related that you can cross off your list.

If your meeting with your boss has been pushed to 5 pm, can you sneak in some exercise in the middle of the day so you’re not tempted to cancel it because you can no longer make the 5 pm slot?  When your muse is not with you for building a killer marketing plan, could you bring forward some admin work you had planned to do later in the week? The idea is not to stall but to switch gears and keep moving.

Signal the Delay

One important thing to do if your schedule is going to the dogs is to let your colleagues know. Unfortunately, I see too many conscientious people who pride themselves on delivering on time and who wait to share their concerns in hopes they can miraculously get everything done. That’s a risky strategy.

If you miss deadlines without warning, you erode their trust and cause them to question your reliability. When you signal the delay, you create an opportunity for a Plan B. That revised approach might even help you get back on track. Your colleague might tell you that the deadline is flexible, that only certain aspects of the work are urgent, or that they can pitch in.

Solicit Help

Finally, if you can feel the deadlines slipping away, asking for help is entirely reasonable. You might need help with the task you’re working on. It’s also possible that the best help would be for someone to catch a different ball that’s about to drop, so at least you don’t have to worry about that.

Help doesn’t have to be directly related to the work either. If you’re heads down, working as efficiently as possible to get something done, help can come in the form of someone grabbing you lunch and bringing it to your desk or running interference with colleagues who come around looking for you. Now, if only someone else could pee for you!

Schedule interruptions happen. The key is to have a variety of tactics you can use to minimize how much time gets wasted. Bob. Weave. Adapt. That’s good time management.

Additional Resources

8 Ways to Feel Less Overwhelmed by Your Workload

10 Helpful Things To Do When You’re Overwhelmed

How to stop the cycle of micro-management

 

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