You step into your bathroom. A penguin peers up at you from inside the tub. You rub your eyes and look again. The penguin lifts its wings like a shrug. 

“What on earth is a penguin doing in the bathtub?!?”

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This is how I wish we reacted when our plans failed.

I set a deadline for myself, and completely missed it? Astonishing! Something surprising happened here, and I want to figure out why!

Instead, it often feels like goals and deadlines are treated like vague aspirations. You simply fail to start writing. The Friday deadline slips past without a whimper. You shrug and move on, because you didn’t really expect it to happen.

Now imagine you treated it like a penguin in the bathtub instead?

You would never just shrug and go about your day if you found a penguin in your bathtub. You would be asking questions and trying to get to the bottom of the mystery.

Similarly, you shouldn’t shrug that your best plans went awry. Maybe it’s okay if that happens every now and then, but if you expect your plans to succeed 80% of the time, then you should notice if they only succeeded 20% of the time! This should be surprising. It’s not inevitable - you can learn how to be accurately calibrated about your plans, though there may be many steps on the path there.

Try to figure out the mystery. Treat yourself as a system and actually try to optimize it. Can you trace back the steps that led to this point? How do you fix it?

If it's Saturday and you didn't finish the paper sections you’d planned to draft on Friday, ask yourself “How did I get here?” --> Huh, so on Friday I felt tired and unmotivated. I felt tired because the three nights before I ended up going to bed late, while still getting up early to push through my work week. By Friday I sort of ran out of gas, and the thought of tackling the paper seems overwhelming. Also, I forgot to schedule coworking sessions.

...thus, maybe, if I want to increase the likelihood of my writing happening, I need to make sure I get an early night on Thursday, and set a reminder to schedule coworking sessions in advance, and break down the paper into smaller segments that feel less daunting…

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Notably absent when finding a penguin in your bathtub is any sense of shame. You wouldn’t beat yourself up – you didn’t do anything wrong!

Similarly, failing to meet your goals isn’t a moral failing. It means you haven’t figured out how to make good enough plans yet, and you need to slap on your detective hat to figure out how you can do better. How did we get here? What needs to happen next so this problem doesn’t happen again? If it does happen again, you know you haven’t solved the mystery. So, you try again. Because you want to solve the mystery.

The usual response I get here is that feeling bad makes sense because you’re responsible. You’re not responsible for the penguin being in the bathtub. One person said “I would feel differently if I’d carefully made a nest in the bathtub the night before and gently tucked a penguin egg inside.”

I hear you. I get that you feel responsible. But it’s not useful to sit there feeling bad about it. It’s useful to figure out how to do differently next time. Sometimes feeling a bit bad can help motivate you to figure out how to do better, but it seems more common that feeling bad just makes you not want to think about it. Totally counterproductive.

But also, “I’m responsible and should feel bad” assumes you just ... could have done it. Like that was an option you had at your finger tips. That’s not usually the case. The post Not yet gods describes my response so well that I’ll just direct you there. “Acting as you wish doesn't happen for free, it only happens after tweaking the environment and training your brain.”

In the meantime, don’t beat yourself up. Don’t shrug. Just figure out why there is a forking penguin in your bathtub!