Dealing with an Unexpected Monkey Wrench – TPW392

Unexpected disruptions can have a big effect on our routine and schedule, but we can adjust without sacrificing our health or productivity. This week we talk about how to manage life when an unexpected monkey wrench is thrown into your routines. Give yourself some grace when life throws a monkey wrench into your plans When you care about being productive, when you take the time to plan, to organize, and to develop, on purpose, routines that work for you, it can be discouraging when something comes out of nowhere to throw all your plans into disarray. For reasons I’ll explain in a minute, I’ve been thinking this week about how to manage life when an unexpected event occurs that completely disrupts your normal routines.  My life is pretty simple. I work from home, so I seldom have reason to leave home during the week. I have a basic routine for my mornings, my workday, and my evenings. There’s a fairly repetitive rhythm to my weeks that generally allows me to get my legal work done, get podcast episodes published, and get my house in order. Some people probably would think my life is boring, but I’m content with it. I like the routines and rhythm of it and I like generally knowing what to expect and what I can get done over the course of a week.  This week, though, something unexpected happened that disrupted everything--my work, my daily routines, and my thinking. The short story is I was selected as a juror on a criminal trial that started immediately and continued through the week, and is expected to take up most of next week as well. In a matter of a few minutes, everything I had planned for the week had to be tossed.  When the unexpected happens The phrase I’ve been thinking about all week is “monkey wrench”--as in something happens that throws a monkey wrench into your plans. This is a phrase I heard often growing up but as it was on my mind this week I got curious about where it came from:  The phrase “throw a monkey wrench into” means:   “Sabotage or frustrate a project or plans, as in The boss threw a monkey wrench into our plans when he said we'd have to work Saturday. This transfer of industrial sabotage—that is, throwing a tool inside machinery—to other subjects dates from the early 1900s.” I learned in researching this there actually is a tool called a monkey wrench. According to Wikipedia:  "The monkey wrench is a type of adjustable wrench, a 19th-century American refinement of 18th-century English coach wrenches. It was widely used in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It is of interest as an antique among tool collectors and is still occasionally used in maintenance and repair when it happens to be convenient. . . . The largely US idiom "to throw a monkey wrench into..." means to sabotage something. The British English equivalent is "to throw a spanner in the works". What kinds of unexpected things can disrupt life? Examples:  * Jury duty  * The car breaks down  * Injury or illness  * When COVID first hit--schools and businesses closed, having to work and learn from home (even if you were already home, having everybody else there)  * Serious weather event  What’s the effect? Routines are disrupted. And here I’m not talking about just routines we’ve crafted intentionally to boost productivity, but simply the routines that develop organically because we are creatures of habit. In