Last week, things got pretty fucked.
Okay, to be fair, nothing actually got fucked—I was just REALLY busy juggling different deadlines, appointments, and other commitments that all seemed to fall to the end of April. To make matters worse, I still haven’t entirely unpacked at my new place, so my office and much of the rest of the apartment is still a mass of boxes and piles. This meant that when I needed to find something from those boxes or piles, instead of just reaching over and grabbing it, I needed to search for it, which meant I spent a lot of time searching that could have been been spent on other things (like actually unpacking…)
To get through this incredibly stressful week, I wrote out an Emergency To-Do list organizing everything I needed to do in approximate order, then went about finishing those things one by one. It was still a stressful week, but I felt better knowing I had a plan to get through it.
What made everything worse, though, was that I overextended myself in terms of LITERALLY trying to be two places in the same time—or at least, promising to be in two places at the same time. This happened not once, but twice last week, which was a wake-up call that my stress levels were waaaaaaaaay higher than I wanted them to be.
Today, though, now that the dust has cleared, I want to talk about how these two double-booking happened, what I did about them, and how I’m going to avoid this in the future.
Double-Booking #1: The Social Gathering
Double-Booking #1 happened several weeks ago over a conversation at dinner. One of my friends wanted to plan a small social gathering with four of us on a weekend evening, since she keeps pretty busy during the week. That sounded like a good idea, so we set aside a Saturday night several weeks in advance to meet, then left it at that.
Whelp, because we made the plans over dinner, I didn’t actually check my schedule book to see if I already had plans that Saturday, since it was so far in advance.
After that, well—I never did mark the gathering down in my schedule book. Instead, I just kind of remembered it, keeping it in the back of my mind and telling myself that I’d think about it later. I don’t usually do this, but for some reason I saw this purely social gathering as completely separate from everything else I had going on.
Somewhere along the line, though, I actually did check my schedule book and found that I already had tickets to an event that night . I felt incredibly bad—the only question was what to do about it.
After some thought (read: procrastination because I was embarrassed), I texted my friend apologizing for the mistake and letting her know what had happened. I suggested alternate days, and even suggested meeting earlier that afternoon, but sadly, nothing worked, and our plans are now on hiatus.
I felt genuinely bad about this, both because I’d let my friend down, and because I’d screwed up by not checking my schedule book sooner. To make sure this doesn’t happen again, I made a resolution to, very simply, check my schedule book on weekends when I’m making social plans, rather than viewing it as a Work Only tool. (At the end of the day, work and personal plans should all go on the same calendar, since they both involve you!)
Some of you reading this are likely thinking that if I used a phone calendar like Google or Outlook, I could have pulled out my phone and checked it while we were making the initial plans, thus avoiding the entire problem. For a lot of people this is probably the ideal solution, but I try to avoid unnecessary phone time and prefer having all of my notes and to-do plans in one tactile book where I can mark things down by hand. The downside to this is of course that I can’t bring my schedule book everywhere, but I can make a better habit of checking it when making tentative plans on the weekends.
Double-Booking #2: The Favor
This one is more complicated, and presents an ethical dilemma.
Months and months ago, a friend asked me to do him a favor on a specific day far in the future, which happened to be last Friday. It was a small favor, and that friend’s definitely helped me in the past, so I said sure, marked it down in my schedule book, and left it at that.
Fast forward a few weeks, when I got a really cool opportunity to speak at my town library in Warner at an author and artists event. I was really interested in joining and talking about my writing in front of a crowd, so of course I said yes.
The problem, though, was that the library event was on the same day that I’d promised to do the favor for my friend. It wasn’t at the exact time, but it was on the same day. The favor, unfortunately, took place a long distance from the library event, but I optimistically opted to join the library event and decided to ask my friend if the favor could maybe be rescheduled—and if not, with a bit of extra driving, I could make both happen.
Now, this is where I really screwed up: when I talked to my friend about the double-booking, I downplayed the amount of driving I was going to have to do to make both the favor and the library event work. And, because I made it out to be no big deal, my friend more or less shrugged it off too, and walked away with the understanding that I would do both the favor and the Warner library event.
However, as the big day approached and I got busier and busier, I realized that doing both was going to be, in actuality, a struggle. I’d have to do two hours of driving in addition to the actual favor, AND taking care of normal work tasks on a weekday. This caused me a fair amount of stress leading up to the day of the double-booking, and I knew that while I could technically do both, it was going to make for a busy, busy few days.
…which is exactly what happened. The library event went quite well and I gave a solid talk with the other presenters, but I found myself incredibly stressed leading up to it, and fell behind on some other work I had to postpone. And, though I took care of the actual favor, I didn’t do as good a job with it as I would have liked, and felt like I let my friend down.
Once again, the goal here is clear: when these types of super-busy situations come up, I HAVE to be better about saying No and not overextending myself, even if the commitments technically take place at different times. If I’d been more firm with my friend weeks ago about not being able to do both, I feel confident that he would have understood and we could have worked something out. But, because I acted confident about being able to do both, he didn’t realize the problem, whereas I really should have been more cautious.
Learning From Your Mistakes is Crucial
I had a talk with somebody the other day about mistakes, and how they offer opportunities to help us grow. Sure, mistakes suck and can really put us behind, but if we walk away from them with a better understanding of how to avoid those mistakes in the future, we can work towards becoming better people, and ultimately making our lives better too. (This outlook lies in strict contrast to just saying “It is what it is” and seeing the problem as unchanging.)
So, in that sense, maybe my super-busy week where I screwed up some things actually worked out in the end, because it could very well save me from making even more mistakes down the line.
Cover photo used under a Creative Commons 2.0 license.