Discardia_ More Life, Less Stuff - Dinah Sanders [85]
The principle of not letting it get to you through giving yourself better options applies everywhere. Head your irritation off at the pass by doing something easy early. Prevention is a form of upgrade. A stitch in time really does save nine, whether it’s giving yourself the right tools or just unconsciously fine-tuning your environment as you move through it. When your bedroom looks nice merely because you happened to have automatically put away one thing that was in the wrong place every time you entered the room today, then you know that you’re getting the hang of this.
Symptom #34: Bad Scene, Man
Solution #34: Avoid Unnecessary Hassles
It's amazing how much we can all resist a perfectly good enough solution (or choice of what we want to do) because it seems too simple.
—Jeri Dansky
Scenario planning
We can avoid much of what irritates us with a little advance thinking, such as the great productive pattern of scenario planning. When you are creating or modifying something—a new furniture arrangement, a new aspect of your routine, or a new way that you want to approach particular social situations—design for the expected use as well as for several possible other conditions, in case major variables switch to other settings than what you had predicted. Prepare yourself for comfortably rolling with the changes.
Writer and futurist Stewart Brand, in How Buildings Learn (a book that informs about a much broader range of thinking than merely the architectural), discusses this principle: “All buildings are predictions. All predictions are wrong.”
I'll tone it down just a hair: All plans are predictions. No predictions are 100% perfect.
By preparing yourself for imperfection and envisioning reasonable responses to the most likely alternate scenarios, you'll reduce your stress and optimize your results.
Here's an example: Over the past few years I kept reading about treadmill desks and thinking “Wow, that might work great for me. I love walking and I work better when a little of my attention can be busy with something (such as listening to music).” I finally reached a point where I was ready to try it. Instead of just making a plan to switch to the first one I discovered, which would be a major investment, I thought about possible alternate scenarios to “Everything goes as I hope and I love it.”
Alternative scenario #1: “I don't love it.”
Influence on my plan: Find a way to invest less money on the experiment so it's not too painful if it doesn't work out. (I have more time than money. If you're the opposite, ordering the fancy preassembled solution could work for you if you are satisfied with the company's return policy.)
Alternative scenario #2: “I totally love it and want it permanently, but it takes up too much space and disrupts our use of the room which serves as my office and our guestroom and my partner’s desk area.”
Influence on my plan: Explore ways to rearrange that room to allow for all the functions for which we currently use it instead of assuming that I need to leave my current workspace where it is.
Alternative scenario #3: “I like it, but my body takes a long time to adjust to working while standing.”
Influence on my plan: Create “infrastructure” to support taking care of myself physically. Continue using a rest reminder (I use TimeOut on the Mac) to give myself time away from the keyboard and treadmill. Make a nice seating area near enough to my walking desk where I can step off for a few minutes and rest my body while writing on paper or reading a book or doing something else that doesn't require the computer.
Even a short brainstorming sprint on other things likely to happen besides your favorite prediction will allow you to plan better and build solutions, which can accommodate a variety of futures