It is Friday and the lesson of the week is, I am in charge of my schedule and I need to exercise that control. Otherwise I will overbook the week, and then spend all my time pissing and moaning about how busy I am and overtired I am. How counter-productive is that!
This is a lesson that I have to learn over and over again it seems, as I lower my guard and let slippage of my scheduling occur. It is a critical mistake on my part, and perhaps you find yourself doing the same thing? It is ever so easy to do, especially when trying to compress too much into too small a space.
We tell ourselves that we are leveraging the available time to maximize the results, but personally I just find this exhausts me, and marginalizes the potential value. I seem to be most susceptible to this negative phenomena when I am in a city for a short period of time, and when I have too many commitments to fit into that time. And I tend to do this when I have competing agenda's and work on either end of the trip - and then it spirals from there.
This is doubly negative when clients and work is shortchanged and nothing is as well accomplished as it would be under better planning. To have the discipline required to say "no" is the linchpin of decision making. If the work is important enough to do in the first place, then it certainly is worthy of having my best, and I (nor can you) can not produce the best work when under-resourced. Adequate time and energy to do it right the first time is the only way to do it right, and as John Wooden says, "If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have enough time to do it over?"
