How to avoid crisis management at home

Are you a crisis manager? How do you cope when sods law hits.  Sods law being when everything that can go wrong does. Most of us resort to headless chicken, fire fighting mode.  If you were in a corporate environment this would be called crisis management.

Considering yourself as a manager, well actually more of a CEO (Chief Executive Officer), of a family, is a pretty good way to recognise all the roles you play and how pivotal you really are.

Of course everyone has there own style of management whether in the home or the corporate environment – but there are some lessons we can take in “home management” from the corporate world.

The definition of crisis management in corporate speak, is if you find that your life is pretty well continuously governed by uncontrolled external issues, which you have to constantly react to.

If that sounds slightly familiar putting a business hat on might just revolutionise your life and reduce your stress levels.

Generally the reason that you get into patterns of crisis management is because you fail to plan, plus you also set unrealistic time requirements on your self and others, so you are always running late, or running out of time to get stuff done.

The underlying cause for this maybe you have too much to do and too little time, or conversely you simply like living in fast paced environments, with lots of things going on and lots of balls in the air.

The trouble is that if one thing is certain, from time to time you are going to drop one of those balls.  Now there are two sorts of problems, those that you can predict will happen and those that you can not predict.

Having a well developed plan which makes allowances, or has solutions for the problems that you can predict will help you avoid most of the crisis which happen on a day to day basis.

As most day to day crisis are the result of external factors, it is worth stopping and evaluating what external factors are likely to cause you the most problems, and what pressure points crop up repeatedly.  And then work out ways that you can avoid these incidents happening on such a regular basis.

So take a notebook and write down the mini crises that occur on a regular basis in your house. It maybe losing the keys, waking up late, or not having any milk for breakfast. 

Creating a plan and putting systems in place, whether it is a post it note,  an extra set of keys, or another alarm clock is going to help ensure that particular problem is not likely to happen so often.

Ignore it at your peril, crisis management is tiring and stressful and a lot of the time with a little planning can be avoided.