Crazy fact: I didn’t even realize I hadn’t posted a blog last week until now. That’s how sick we’ve been. It’s amazing how everything falls to the wayside in the midst of illness. Both my husband and I are more than ready to return to our regular schedule.
I can’t tell you how happy that makes me 🙂 It means that our regular schedule is one that pushes us towards our goals, rather than our goals getting lost among the day-in, day-out reality of school, housekeeping, etc., etc.
How do we do that? Planning ahead and prioritizing the important–that’s the short answer. I really love the concept of risk management over crisis management. Risk management is when you take time to look at your schedule (or finances) and list out potential issues before they become issues. It allows you to take the stitch in time approach (you know, “a stitch in time saves nine”) where you solve the problem before it can get started. Crisis management, on the other hand, is when you live like a fire fighter, constantly putting out one fire after another. Problems are already full blown fires when they come to your attention.
For us, risk management means we sit down every Friday and talk about what expenses are coming up and how we want to budget for them. We also talk about our schedule for the upcoming week and what things need to get done–as well as what might potentially turn into a crisis. For instance, we make our own liver pills. It’s time-consuming, but it’s the only way I’ve gotten my kids to take liver 😉 So, I added making new liver pills onto our list before we ran out of the old ones. I didn’t want us to be out and then suddenly have something new added to the list (especially not something that takes extra time). We didn’t actually finish the new pills before we ran out, but the running out wasn’t a surprise. New pills were already on our radar.
Last week, on our podcast, Epic Every Day, Evan and I talked about how the holidays are coming. Thanksgiving is two weeks away!! TWO! I still can’t wrap my brain around that. Probably because we’ve been sick and out of our routine for the past two and a half weeks. My brain thinks it’s still October. But we’re preparing. We sat down with our kids last week to make a family holiday must-do list (stuff like making cookies and going to our favorite lights displays). Today we did more Christmas shopping and are having a gift wrapping party tonight.
A pinch of prevention is worth an ounce of cure. I’ve been wondering lately where else we can apply a pinch of prevention. I’m sure there are places I’m not seeing–time to ask God to show us where those places are! So how about you guys: any great ways you’ve found to consistently nip problems in the bud?
