sacha chua living an awesome life

Okay, I’m starting to get really annoyed at the weakness of my calendar system. The Google Calendar integration into Notes would have worked… if I hadn’t confused myself badly. Fortunately, I can redeem myself, but I need to either get better at handling appointments or find ways of minimizing them entirely.

I had a tentative entry for a chat with Sambhavi Chandrashekar. We chatted over the phone and pushed that out a bit, because she’ll be busy for a few weeks. Having briefly scanned my calendar, I assumed that the somewhat-vaguely-named “Lunch with Sacha Chua” entry was related to that chat. No, it wasn’t. It was with someone else.

I got the Google reminder on my phone and (eventually) in my Lotus Notes calendar, so it’s not about setting up a better reminder system.

And to think I suggested the date and place, too! Embarrassing.

So, how can I avoid making mistakes like this in the future?

The key problem was that the meeting notice I added to my calendar had insufficient details. I had received an event invitation through e-mail and I couldn’t figure out how to add it to my Lotus Notes calendar, so I tried accepting it through Gmail. However, I must’ve accepted it incorrectly, because it didn’t contain any reference to the original sender. Next time, I should double-check that calendar entries have all the relevant details, and that these details are included in the subject line whenever possible.

If that’s in place, then the second thing I need to do is slow down and be more mindful during my morning reviews. It’s very hard to catch yourself assuming something, particularly when you’re distracted. Maybe I should make this a morning ritual: savor a cup of tea and go over all the important details of the day. It’ll be worth avoiding these spikes of stress.

I can also minimize the risk of this happening by moving more social appointments to flexible times whenever possible. Instead of meeting people over lunch, I can invite them to tea at my place. This has the added benefit of being able to bring interesting people together. I can’t do this for all appointments, though, so I really do need to improve my process here.

… and no, even handy services like I Want Sandy won’t help, because the problem was that I glossed over the reminder because I assumed it was related to a different event that had been cancelled.

The key thing, then, is to slow down when my calendar is involved, because that’s one of my weak points. The times that my calendar system tends to fail are when my Lotus Notes application is closed because I’m having software problems and when my calendar is too crowded or I know parts of it are out of date. I’m dealing with the first case by copying all my appointments into my Emacs Org planner during my morning review, which _should_ have caught today’s error if I had put enough information in the subject line. So I should slow down and click on all the details to make sure I know the full details of each appointment, especially if it was one I’d made several weeks ago.

Okay, how can I practice this? I’ve forwarded the details of another interesting event to the person I failed to meet today, and we might meet then. I can practice by inviting other friends out to lunch or dinner. I can give myself a minimum amount of time for my morning planning (that’s a strange idea, but it just might work). I can practice making scheduled commitments. I can practice by working on tasks that require several days’ or hours’ lead time, too.

I can hack this. Grr.

My proposal was accepted at an IBM conference on best practices! I’m thrilled to have all these opportunities to share what I’m learning and to learn even more from other people. It’s a little mindboggling dealing with all of this as an early-career employee with less than half a year on the job, but I know from personal experience just how wonderful public speaking is when it comes to networking and connecting with people.

I’ll need to work extra hard to balance all these conferences with paying work, and to show the business value of all of that. It’s a bit of a challenge in the consulting world where we’re supposed to maximize our utilization, but maybe it will work out well.

To help keep track of all the conferences, articles, and other significant events on my horizon, I’ve added an upcoming events widget below the calendar on my blog. I used MagpieRSS and PHP to read the XML file from Google Calendar, and I did a little regular expression magic to get just the dates and locations. Maybe you’ll find it useful too!

Business responsibilities come first. If my clients aren’t happy, I may just have to pull out of some of the conferences. I think everything will work out, though, and the conferences will help me bring even more value to my client work!

My social calendar tends to stay relatively full. I have to
consciously schedule breaks into it because otherwise I just pack it
with stuff. Google Calendar’s monthly view is great for keeping things
sorta organized. I’m really, really tempted to write a social app that
makes it easier to manage these get-togethers – what Filipinos call
“gimmicks”.

Such an app would have a floating list of non-time-specific
activities, with people indicating interest or even availability.
People should be able to take events from that list and schedule it
onto a group calendar.

There should be *some* way I can easily manage having multiple
overlapping circles of friends. See, there’s a reason why I’d rather
blend groups!

And all of this, of course, should be available from a mobile
interface so that I can go from one event to another.

But that’s too much interface complexity, so it has to stay inside my
head. ARGH!

On Technorati: calendar, social