Appointments with Yourself

If we make an appointment with another person, and enter that appointment into our calendar, then we commit to it. If something comes up to disrupt that, we arrange with the other person to move the appointment to another time.

Why not make some appointments with yourself, to schedule time to do "stuff". You could make an appointment to work on that special project, write that report, clear out your email inbox, go out for your morning excercise and so on.

There are two big benefits of doing this:

1. By scheduling much of what you need and want to do, you get a sense of what might be possible in a given time period and are less likley to overcommit. If you have scheduled appointements for the entire week, then you are unlikely to make another appointment that would conflict with one - you would simply say "This week I have no free time, could we schedule for next week?"
2. By scheduling an appointment for a given task, you are much more likely to commit to it - but you MUST honour appointments with yourself as highly as appointments with others. YOU TOO are important!

So, get out those calendars and start making appointments with yourself!