I’m about to save you hours of pain, anxiety and stress. Take your S.M.A.R.T goal, your lose 10kg in 3 months, make $20k in 3 months, catch up to the latest Game of Thrones Episode in 1 day. etc.

Take that and just double the time constraint that you put on yourself.

There’s something that I always neglect when I sit down and write up my weekly plan. I plan everything down to the minute — I even set aside leeway for trains that are running late. I always neglect to plan for one thing though:

Things going wrong.

It might be my own optimism or belief in my efficiency but what I started noticing when I started timeblocking was that I was horribly bad at estimating time taken to complete tasks — leading me to be late to arrangements and meetings fairly often (sorry, friends). I’m getting better though.

If I’m absolutely methodical with my diet, count my calories to the “T”, work out every day then I can absolutely hit these goals. I’m talking about the weekend when I’m so depressed that I just sit on the couch, watch the game and smash a bag of Dorritos. Or when you’ve jam packed your Sunday with productive and life changing work, your mum asks you to help her with the grocery shopping for two hours and now your Sunday (and your week) is ruined.

Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

These are obviously just minor inconveniences and won’t make much difference in the grand scale of things but then there are always greater barriers to reaching your goals. Things might be rolling along quite nicely for you and then suddenly you lose your job, you’re sick for a month or you have to take care of your sick parents for awhile. These are things that will make a much larger impact on your goals and are almost never planned for in my experience.

Now, that’s obvious for the next time we plan something but what about the crisis that we are going through right now?

The common advice is to take a break, get some air and let your brain refocus. If you’re anything like me you know that this is as tough as it gets. When something goes wrong for me it takes all my willpower to not think about it. I usually dwell on it all week until something breaks me from my spell. I physically have to remove myself from the environment and actually do something physically straining. What it does it moves my thoughts from the anxiety and stress and into my aching calves or arms. Go to the gym or a run. A walk doesn’t help me because it’s not physically straining enough.

Once you’ve had a little break, go back to what you can control. What effect can I actually have on the outcome? Focus on that and entirely that. Don’t worry about what happened in the past, give yourself some more leeway to achieve this big goal and attack it again with renewed focus.

You’re going to fail at times. Things aren’t always going to go your way. Cut yourself some slack. It’s more important that this thing happens than it happening when you want it to. If you’re just about to start a big project/undertaking, give yourself a lot more time than you think you need. If you’re in the middle of something and it’s getting tough, cut yourself some slack. It’s going to take a lot longer than you think but it’s going to happen eventually.