A Study in Schedule Complexity
Greetings, gentle reader.
It’s Friday once again, and I find myself sitting in front of a computer, trying to figure out what to write about. I had great intentions last week. In particular, I was going to prime the drywall I have smoothed out so I can see if I’ve done a good enough job. But that didn’t happen.
Why not? I want to examine that very question. I’ll work backwards from today and see what I can recall:
Yesterday (Thursday, June 6th) I wound up getting my hair cut in the morning and attending a meeting hosted by the local chlorine production plant in the afternoon. Collectively, those things wiped out Thursday for drywall work. I need a few hours in a row to prep everything, do the work, and clean up, which wasn’t possible with that schedule.
But, I hear you ask, why did I schedule those events on that day? Well…
- The haircut would usually have been set for this coming Saturday, but we have a telecom company coming to install fibre optic cable to the house that morning, and my stylist just happened to have a slot open on Thursday, so I took it.
- The time of the chlorine plant meeting was set by the company. They ran two meetings, one in the afternoon and another in the early evening. And I needed to attend one of them as part of my hyper-local journalism project. The plant is not too far from the house and wants to extend their lease to keep producing chlorine for water treatment, but chlorine production comes with some risk. I need to stay informed and this is part of doing so, even if it’s only a sales pitch.
How about Wednesday? Turns out there was a meeting with our mayor and our MLA (Member of the Legislative Assembly, for my non-Canadian readers, kind of like a state representative) at a local library right in the middle of the day. Again, I needed this to keep informed, and the timing wiped out the ability to do any drywall work, particularly when combined with Anne needing dinner out that evening after a particularly stressful rehearsal. Oh, and I did some complex software updates to the community association website that afternoon as well. Those took an hour and a half.
Tuesday then? Well, the morning was lost to meeting with the contractor and an architect. The latter seems good, and I hope we have found someone to work with and help us keep things under control with the District when we go apply for permits. The final decision on that is still up in the air, but it is possible.
So why didn’t I deal with the drywall in the afternoon? It turns out that the morning meeting was early enough that I didn’t get anywhere near through my morning news feed processing, and (again) I need to do that to stay informed and keep after my weird, unpaid journalism(ish) career. So by the time that meeting was over, lunch had happened, I was caught up and the dog had been walked, it was too late.
Monday June third? Here, I have to admit that my memory and my email archive let me down. I can’t recall (or find) whatever it was that kept me busy, but I didn’t get the drywall work done. I think it was cold and raining, and I put it off until a day or two later because the weather would be much better. Not that I am actually working in the rain — this is an indoor job — but I need good light to see how things are working, and painting in the coldest part of the house wouldn’t have been fun. Oh, and I had a District council meeting to attend that evening.
That’s not much of an excuse (or a reason) for losing Monday, but it’s all I have.
Now we’re back to last weekend, and know what I was doing here: I was finishing my review of a novel for Gary, and generally hiding from the cold and the rain.
And that brings me back to last Friday, when I said I would try to get the drywall work done in the next week. Ugh. Am I fully excused for not getting to the drywall work? Not really. I probably could have squeezed it in somewhere, but I was actually fairly busy. Things kept stacking up — both planned an unplanned — in ways that didn’t leave enough time to get it done. I’m sure you can relate. Everyone’s life is like this to some degree.
And being honest, next week is already looking iffy. There are things on the calendar already for tomorrow (Saturday), Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Add in a few unexpected events and all the time I spend just trying to understand the world and my local community, and it seems unlikely I will get there. Still, I will try. Thursday currently looks possible. Maybe.
This is all a bit frustrating. But don’t get me wrong, I actually enjoy most of what I find myself doing. It’s just that I am stupidly optimistic about how much I might get done in a given week, and I am similarly frustrated when I don’t manage to accomplish everything I wanted or planned.
In any case, I have a long to-do list for today that I have to keep after. I hope you are doing well and that your own list is much shorter than mine!