Today I want to talk about lead time management, or the art of controlling procrastination.
May 2012, April 2012
For a long trip like this, you need a lot of things. And you need to make a lot of plans. Sometimes, getting these things or making these plans need to be done with adequate lead time. For instance, once we started making reservations for hotels or flights, all of the dates became very sticky. If you're flying out on Tuesday, you absolutely need a hotel Tuesday night. And if you're spending Wednesday and Thursday at a location, then you absolutely need a hotel at that location for Wednesday and Thursday.
Since one of us (she shall remain nameless) has very strong ideas about specific hotels and often specific rooms in a hotel, once we started blocking out the trip it became a bit of a race to get all the reservations locked down. We actually did about 90% of it in a single 48 hour period at the beginning of January. I felt pretty good. Not procrastinating - getting the reservations made 4.5-5.5 months in advance got us almost everything we wanted exactly when we wanted it. Had we waited, I'm convinced that some of the choices would have been sold out, and we would have had to settle for second best (best being a relative term, defined by our wants and desires). Same with the air reservations.
Another aspect of managing procrastination is getting stuff. If you think you might want to buy something new for the trip (a jacket, a camera, whatever), you need to think a bit about how long it will realistically take to get it. And you can balance that with the desire to not commit too far in advance, in case your plan or what you want changes. Some things you can get pretty quickly, and some things there really isn't a strong likelihood of changing your mind about. We wanted toothpaste holders to replace the baggies we've been using, but didn't expect any difficulty acquiring them. So we just picked them up when we happened to see them in the store.
Some items are more complex. I wrote the other day about a new camera backpack I decided I wanted. The decision came after trying a lot of alternatives (mostly bags I already owned) under the use patterns I expect to have on the trip, and researching the available solutions when they all fell short. So I ordered this bag last Monday, expecting to have it Friday and having plenty of time to pilot it's use in the field - including a short business trip this week by air. As I wrote earlier, carry-on luggage optimization is a difficult task - with the airlines doing their best to frustrate you. This bag is a key part of the equation.
Fstop "Guru" backpack, April 2012
I got an email from Fstop the next day, which included a link to UPS showing a scheduled delivery Friday afternoon.
It didn't come Friday, which is surprising, as UPS and FedEx are pretty good at hitting their promised deliver dates.
It didn't come Saturday.
Monday morning I emailed the manufacturer and it turns out they had some problem with our credit card and cancelled the order. They claim to have emailed me about this and got no response; I have no record of this email and I've received a number of emails from them so they're not being spam filtered. And I checked my spam bucket anyway. I'm assuming we had a double failure: I entered the wrong credit card info, and they typed in the wrong email address.
Anyway, it's back on order and I should have it this afternoon. That leaves me only three weeks to try it out, and figure out another plan if this one fails, which might include another order delay. So while I'm comfortable with the level of procrastination I had here, I'm really using most of the time I have before having to fall back onto a solution with one of the bags I already have.
Did I leave enough time? I think so. But we'll see after I go live with the bag for a month.
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