2009-04-22

Beware of your routines

First, a short story:
When I woke up this morning, it was already seven o'clock (and I should get up at 6:30). I wondered why I didn't hear the music and found that it must have been my little son playing around there. So I did everything in a hurry, looked at the temperature outside, wondered why it was (still) so fresh outside. Then I wondered why there is so few traffic on the streets. I began to wonder, looked at the time on my watch and on my mobile phone... - I was an hour too early. My son must have been playing around with time adjustment also. :)

At the gas station, when filling the tank I am always trying to get a clean sum of money to avoid to much money changes. This time by mistake I was 2 cents above 45 Euro. From Italy I know that they wouldn't ask me the 2 cents. Here in Austria maybe not. The guy asked me the 2 cents, which I found bad customer service as I know that gas stations make a lot of money here. And there are 2 other gas stations very next to the one where I stop...

Then it happened that a driver on that street apparently woke up in bad mood and showed an aggressive driving style although so few traffic. I had to hit on the breaks to avoid a crash.
This was basically my morning. So, what to learn?

All those things have something in common: There might be a little trigger that cause you to run a complete program automatically without either thinking and/or without any further review.

When going through your routines or while doing "business as usual", it is important to review behavior and processes from time to time - or in single cases. Sometimes it may be worth making exceptions. But people do follow their automatic routines even if it is not appropriate...

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