Now is good
You may as well save yourself some scheduling work
Busy people live by their calendars. We know that what is scheduled gets done. So whenever we want something to happen, we pull out the calendar and figure out when in the future would work.
But if you are trying to figure out when something could happen, consider the present too. Often now is as good as any other time, and in many cases, now has some upsides that the future can’t promise.
For instance, if a colleague sticks her head in your office to ask if she could schedule time to talk through a question with you, you may be tempted to survey your calendar for a 30-minute spot. But she already has your attention. You have already stopped whatever else you were doing. Given that it often takes people 5-10 minutes to resume what they were doing after an interruption, it would be most efficient to see if she could talk right then. Now is good! Of course, if she isn’t ready to have the conversation, you’ll need to schedule for another time. But if this happens a few times, she might get in the habit of only asking for a meeting if she’s prepared for it, which would not be a bad thing.
Or maybe you run into a friend you haven’t seen in a while as you’re both walking into the grocery store. If she suggests getting together to catch up some time, see if she could chat right then. You could shop together. Or maybe your grocery store has a coffee shop where you could chat for 15 minutes before doing your shopping. If you’re not urgently racing to something else, this might, in fact, be your best chance for a while. After all, you’re both there. You’re going to have to do a lot of work to make that happy coincidence happen again in the future.
I often suggest that if you’re asked to do something in the future, you should ask yourself if you would do it tomorrow. We tend to view our far future selves as having more energy and time than our present selves. We know what’s on the agenda for tomorrow. We know how we’d feel about doing something tomorrow. If it’s a definite no for tomorrow — as in, you wouldn’t be tempted to cancel other things to fit this in — you’re not going to feel differently in six months.
But the flip side of this truth is that if there is something you do want or need to do, you may as well do it now. Maybe some time in the future is better, but most likely you have as much time now as you will at any other random point in the next year or two. If it possibly fits now, this has the benefit of not requiring an additional layer of scheduling work. Your future self will be free to schedule her own time.
This is so very helpful. Thank you!
This is a freaking brilliant observation - "We tend to view our far future selves as having more energy and time than our present selves." I think you've also mentioned something similar before in relation to things you don't want to do now but think your future self will want to - I think about this a lot when making decisions on things that don't sound great now and limit my temptation to agree for later because I probably won't want to do it then either!
But I definitely do this at work - I get a lot of pings on Teams chat (remote work) and it's easier just to answer than set up a meeting or remember to come back to it later. A nice side effect of this (as long as it's not regularly interrupting your deep work) is that people start seeing you as trustworthy and reliable so it's a nice way to build relationships at work.