Plan time to fail
Why you should give yourself the time to fail
The pressure of success
In our modern work environment we try to be the more productive, fast and excellent possible. In this world of perfection there is little space for failure. If we do not have time to fail we will only use methods that we now will succeed. That means we are always building on the same known blocks and avoid innovation that could lead to failure.
The pressure of success can prevent us of trying new and innovative ways of solving a problem.
These new way could be in fact more productive, fast and excellent that the previous. But to achieve this goal we have to go through the whole journey, and this journey includes failure.
Be free to fail
As we now from learning to ride a bike, you have to fail to learn. But when you already now some safe ways of doing something you are not that motivated to use a new way that may be not successful and make you lose time. The big problem here is that the time we might lose was allocated only to success and therefore if we fail, we are in defficit. If you plan time for failure you know that this time you invest is already lost. If nothing comes out of it, that’s ok. You have planned that. If something comes out of it, then Youpie! You have a profit!
“When you plan time to fail, you know that the expected outcome of this task is nothing. And this takes the pressure off”
How to plan failure
“Even failure can be planned to be more fun”
Set the timing
If you need time to fail, you need to book time for it in your calendar. The amount of time for trying new things and fail has to be big enough to let you learn something new. I would recommend to have at least half a day or a day of failure time planned. It’s great to know that you have the day to just play a bit with an idea and then see if something happens.
Set the numbers
On of the biggest problem when you have setup time to do new things is that you might start to procrastinate. That’s good if it does not take all your failure time. A simple trick to avoid that is to set a number of things you want to test out. For example, you may say: “I want to have 3 prototypes of the ideas”, or “I want to test 5 new tools for building a website today”. Knowing that, you will procrastinate just enough time to find new tools, and then feel the pressure to work and test the tools.
Try new things
Now that you have time to fail, you should just take some minutes to think about what will be the new things you want to try out. For example, if you are a logo designer and you usually work with vector drawing you may just plan for the fun to create a logo with paint (not the App, even if that could also be quiet fun).
Going further
I wrote some articles on prototyping that could help you while playing during your new failure times.
