Scheduling

Every morning I get my schedule through Google mail, and every morning it says “Nothing Scheduled”. Of course that isn’t true but that’s what it says. The fact that I don’t write down what I need to be doing has a lot to do with it.

It seems like it would be a perfect world if I planned my schedule, a month or even a week at a time and followed it. But it never seems to work that way. I’ll be working away at a project, say a painting, some design work or work for the Monadnock Area Artist Association and then suddenly something comes up and everything changes. Now that’s no excuse for not writing down what my plans were, as oppose to keeping that in my head, but some degree of flexibility is required. Although if I had a plan, maybe things wouldn’t sneak up on me.

Take last Friday for instance, I was planning to continue work on a web site I am designing for a client. Thursday I had developed a banner and Friday I could work on some page layouts. But then a deadline attacked me. There was a posting on Facebook by a friend about sending Christmas cards to men and women in the service. I copied it to share but was thinking in the back of my head that this same thing had come around last year and there was a problem with the address. I thought about researching further but didn’t. When another friend commented that she’d gotten letters back from doing that last year, I did the research. It turns out it was the wrong address. I re-posted the correct address but, as happened to me last year the deadline was the next day.

As is my want to do, I always have to make things more complicated than they need be, but I like to make the extra effort when I can. As with last year I wanted to make some hand painted cards. I just figure it’s something I can do to show service people they are appreciated. So instead of continuing with my design project, I painted three cards and rushed to the post office and brought them to the desk to make sure they were postmarked for December 1oth.

Now if I am ever going to reach that goal of writing down schedules and being organized, I should jump on my google calendar for next year, say, December 1 and tell myself to start painting Christmas cards  – done, scheduled December 1, 2011, Holiday Cards for Heros (http://www.redcross.org/holidaymail); I’ll be sure and remind you too.