Time-shifting your effort

The first is the weekly preview. My routines can vary a little bit, but I haven’t missed a weekly preview in a few years now. Some are more in-depth and some are rushed, but they always get done.

The beauty of these are to identify issues well in advance, because solving them the day they arise can be way more difficult. For example, if my wife and I both have a meeting at 3:00 one afternoon, neither of us can pick up our daughter from school. If we discover the overlap a week early, we can adjust schedules or find a friend to help. If we discover the issue at 2:55 that day, it’s a big problem.

The second is just looking at the day ahead. A few days ago, I knew I’d have a busy Saturday morning running some errands, and I wasn’t sure the best route to get from one to the next. Complicating things further is that they weren’t easy things to just look up the address for (one was a weekly vegetable pickup, the other was an emissions test I needed at a place I didn’t know the name of).

In this case, I looked them up the night before and put the events (and addresses!) in my calendar. When I hopped in the car, Android Auto knew where I needed to be next and it was one tap from stop to stop.