Once we take a few samples and get a realistic measure of our day, as humans we still have further capacity for fantasy to engage before we can bring our commitments in line with our cognitive resources.
Because one day flows into another, we can make ourselves think the 24-hour wall is flexible. We push commitments off to the next day, allowing ourselves to imagine the next day isn’t already nearly fully committed to sleeping, eating, showering, dressing, more meetings, more promises to keep; more miles to go.
I had a colleague who grew up in a military family who moved from one duty station to another on average every eighteen months. The need every year or so to pack up all those closets and drawers full of things we think we may use someday caused them to evaluate their possession pretty carefully. Her family developed a rule: if you haven’t used it in the last year, we don’t move it.
I haven’t moved that often, but have crisscrossed the country in my career. It’s a pretty realistic rule. If you’ve gone through all the weather changes, holidays, life events of 365 days and haven’t taken something you own out of its storage place, there’s not much that’s likely different about the upcoming year to cause you to use it.
We find something analogous in our daily projects and action lists. If you have something on your to-do list and haven’t found time for it within a daily wall in a three week period, your next three weeks aren’t likely to find you with fewer demands and priorities. You’re still going to have the same need for sleeping, eating, and getting from place to place. All the people you routinely meet with, report to, and supervise, are still going to need your time. If you went to bed every night for three weeks without getting to something on your list, you’re going to need a new strategy because the next three weeks are unlikely to open up more time.
It’s not that we never get to that aging stuff. However, we’re unlikely to get to it without examining that intention in light of the three cognitive positions that must align to move us forward.
When you intended to act on a commitment and haven’t, whether you note the inaction at the end of the day or the end of three weeks, you want to explore the reason. On any given day, it might be a result of the day’s mechanisms: a fire alarm, an unanticipated client expectation, the absence of a key support person.
All this stuff is unexpected on any given day. Random things happen that require us to push off planned work to another time. At the same time, there is a predictable cycle of random events. You may arrive at work to find a key person has called in sick. It may be unexpected to that day, but key people predictably have unanticipated needs: illness, family emergency, car trouble.
It’s easy for us to imagine these interruptions as one-of-a-kind events. However, we don’t need to be clairvoyant to predict in every three week period, there will be unanticipated events which use up time and that time will never return to us. This week it’s a key employee out. Next period it’s a digital network failure. The following period, it’s a crisis management situation. The next three-week period includes Thanksgiving.