“Your lack of planning is not my urgency.” You have surely heard this popular productive saying. The problem is that my lack of planning… yes it is your urgency. In most cases you cannot avoid it and you are forced to attend to, do or solve the situation that I have created.

In principle, no one deliberately generates an urgency for another. But it happens every day. And many of these problems are generated by my poor planning, my lack of review, my lax control.

It is not always the fault of others

Knowing these causes, and why they occur, is the first step to avoiding them. It is not prevention, it is working intelligently and avoiding a problem that increasingly affects more and more people, who have replaced their real job with that of “fire extinguisher.” Because if you don’t correct this, two things will happen to you:

• You will increasingly have to face more self-induced urgencies. Those known as “self-emergencies.”
• You will create more emergencies for other people: colleagues, collaborators… even clients.

Those emergencies that there are so many at work occur mainly for one of these reasons… or for several at the same time. Notice:

1. Due to poor/lack of task planning

I or the people involved in the emergency do not have the habit of preparing and planning their work. Since I don’t review or review how my things are on a daily or weekly basis, I can’t stay ahead of my tasks and their dates, and now I’m behind. I forget things, I haven’t ordered ahead of time, I’m late for deliveries, I miss a closing date…

How to correct it?

Prepare and plan your work at the end of each day and at the end of the week. With your Control Points you will achieve review, monitor and anticipate to many things about your work.

2. Due to poor/lack of date management

Tasks that do not have a date are a “time bomb”. Similar to those timer bombs that we see in action movies, always ticking, threatening to explode at any moment.

Many times they do not have a great impact, you simply delay and delay them endlessly. But many other times, because you have not assigned an execution date, you are forced to do it at the last minute in a rush and in a sloppy manner.

How to correct it?

Whenever you can, assign dates to all tasks what you write down on your list. Ask and agree, and if they don’t tell you anything, assign them unilaterally. But you are not interested in having those “time bombs” in your work plan.

We are quick to blame others for emergencies and lack of coordination at work. We should start by looking at what is ours, and see if the cause of this urgency has not been in our lack of control, rigor or planning.

3. Overconfidence in deadlines

There are a series of phrases (ways of thinking-and-acting) that must be eliminate from our vocabulary. I encourage you to do so. For example: “there is plenty of time”, “I have room”, “later”… and things like that.

I say this because in real life deadlines are shortened and excess relaxation or complacency are bad travel companions. The “there is plenty of time” is a death trap. You have many tasks on your plate. And many others will come. Today you think you have time for that but deep down that’s not the case.

Imagine that you are hosting a dinner at home. You have the recipe, you have bought everything you need, it seems that you have everything under control. But, instead of starting to prepare food, you start watching a series after telling yourself “there’s plenty of time.” Before you know it, your friends are knocking on the door.

How to correct it?

Get going now, start now, distribute the work now… or you won’t have time to do it the way you want in the time you have. Do not trust the misleading arguments that the mind sometimes gives. Prudence and anticipation.

4. Due to poor or lack of communication

Nowadays we write, send and communicate in such a hurry that coordination between people or teams is doomed to fail. When asking or requesting something (a task, material, information…) it has not been done correctly, so that you or the other person have not understood it well.

Some very common situations:

• Poorly communicated deadlines or delivery dates, or not written down clearly enough.
• Incomplete instructions or expectations not clearly expressed.
• Mixing topics by giving ambiguous orders, something that often happens in the Post Office.
• Change of dates or unexpected delays not properly communicated on time or to the correct person.

How to correct it?

When ordering, ordering or requesting, you must be extremely clear and concretes: what I need, when, from whom and how.

There are more reasons than these four, but these are the most common. Always talking about my things.

Of course there are a million emergencies that do not originate in me (in my planning, my organization…). But before pointing the finger at anyone or blaming whoever, we should do a (sincere) analysis exercise: «Could my lack of plan or control be the cause of some emergencies? Are there any details about my organization that could create future problems for us?

There will be a thousand emergencies that you cannot avoid… but there will be some that, perhaps, it is in your power not to provoke.