There are some great questions at the end of your posts and it’s a bit of a shame you haven’t had much uptake on them. It would be a lot of work to do many of these (which is why they’re good questions!), but I’ll have a go at your ‘slipping through the cracks’ question and do a worked example. Mine is also to do with making appointments.
I thought I did have a good system. I set a lot of Google Calendar email reminders and normally turn up to things with no problems. But actually I screwed up unusually badly twice last year and didn’t do much about it other than think ‘oops that was stupid’.
One was solvable in the end with a mad dash to the train station, but was stressful and annoying. The other one I travelled for three hours to meet up with friends on the wrong day… not my finest moment.
I notice that both of these were made informally on messaging/social media, and the problem was that they never even made it into a calendar in the first place. So I need to make sure everything ends up in the same system, rather than assuming a facebook event reminder or friends talking about it will be enough.
(I’m sure this is very obvious to more organised people, but this really isn’t something that comes naturally for me.)
It’s interesting that the problem is specifically with informal social events. A dentist appointment or work meeting has a kind of serious-business aura where I know it has to go in a system, so I just do that.
To fix this, I’ll have to make sure that arranging an event informally automatically makes me think of putting it on my calendar. I haven’t worked on this much yet, but as a first step I checked to see if this applies to anything coming up, and I did find one upcoming event that was on facebook but not my calendar and added it.
There are some great questions at the end of your posts and it’s a bit of a shame you haven’t had much uptake on them. It would be a lot of work to do many of these (which is why they’re good questions!), but I’ll have a go at your ‘slipping through the cracks’ question and do a worked example. Mine is also to do with making appointments.
I thought I did have a good system. I set a lot of Google Calendar email reminders and normally turn up to things with no problems. But actually I screwed up unusually badly twice last year and didn’t do much about it other than think ‘oops that was stupid’.
One was solvable in the end with a mad dash to the train station, but was stressful and annoying. The other one I travelled for three hours to meet up with friends on the wrong day… not my finest moment.
I notice that both of these were made informally on messaging/social media, and the problem was that they never even made it into a calendar in the first place. So I need to make sure everything ends up in the same system, rather than assuming a facebook event reminder or friends talking about it will be enough.
(I’m sure this is very obvious to more organised people, but this really isn’t something that comes naturally for me.)
It’s interesting that the problem is specifically with informal social events. A dentist appointment or work meeting has a kind of serious-business aura where I know it has to go in a system, so I just do that.
To fix this, I’ll have to make sure that arranging an event informally automatically makes me think of putting it on my calendar. I haven’t worked on this much yet, but as a first step I checked to see if this applies to anything coming up, and I did find one upcoming event that was on facebook but not my calendar and added it.