I had some conversations in the last few weeks about making plans with friends. The idea that I needed to do something about it started when I heard myself saying that I had an invite link for people so they could plan an appointment with me. When the other person anwsered: I almost never plan anything and I will see how the evening goes. I know those evenings, when you didn’t plan anything, usually turn out to be the better unexpected evenings.
Benefits of planning
Planning also has some great benefits. For example: my brother and his wife live in San Francisco and the time difference between Amsterdam and their city is 9 hours. To setup a video call it’s quite handy to be able to just pick a date and time and plan an actual appointment.
Another look at it
So there are two ways to look at planning appointments with friends. Either they make it easier to set a date so you will meet, ór it feels like you have to plan everything and make you feel like you are a slave of your own calendar. At the moment I’m in the realm of being a slave, which doesn’t suit me very well.
I do a lot at the moment and I don’t have the time to do the things I really want to do. Currently I’m vlogging (which takes 1 day a week), I work at MGMco (which takes 3 days a week), and the rest of the week is filled with teaching, own projects, meditation, running, and social life. Social life is nice, but I don’t need as much of it as I have now.
Little sidenote: when planning a date with a girl I usually can’t meet the coming week, which is ridiculous.
It’s time to change
It’s time to drastically change my way of handling appointments. I don’t like being dominated by my own calendar. From now on I will not plan things I don’t need to plan. It seems fair to me to not cancel the recurring apointments and the other appointments I already made.
You want to meet me? Just ask that day if I have plans for that evening, chances are I don’t.