Slaves to our online calendars, we bounce from meeting to meeting at work, and from activity to activty at school and home. The Outlook for tomorrow, and the days yet to come? Busy, busy, busy. Which is why it’s more important than ever to schedule some time for yourself, advises Sam Wilson
I remember when I liked my diary. When it was still my most faithful confidante. My secret friend during those tormented teenage years. It didn’t judge me while I poured my hopes, dreams and fears into it, yet it often helped me gain perspective. (Especially when re-read several years later. Good grief, I was melodramatic.)
Every year, I’d greet its blank pages with hopeful satisfaction, and every year I’d let our relationship tail off, without malice.
My diary used to be how I helped define myself. Unhappily, through some sadistic twist of corporate psychopathy, my diary now defines me.
I work for a large corporate retailer and, as any one who has worked in a corporate can tell you, we are fond of a meeting. So the 9-5 portion of my diary is regularly back-to-back boxes of tentatively booked time. It’s like a really popular girl’s dance card in the 1950s. Only, it’s not the 50s. And it’s not a dance. It’s my LIFE.
Outlook, our chosen provider of corporate meeting management, is also a can-do piece of software. Got another meeting booked in that slot? No problem. We’ll double book it. Got space for a third? Why not? Every morning is like playing Tetris in reverse, trying to figure out which meeting rooms I’ll be running between.
But Outlook just defines Work Me. A family Google Calendar defines everything else. I miss the days when timetables were stuck on the fridge. Now, my phone beeps every time a member of my family even contemplates an activity.
<beep> ‘6-9 pm | Joe to Josh after school, Josh’s house’
<beep> ‘5-7 pm | Ben to extra flute, music school’
<beep> 7- 11 pm |Parents for dinner, our house’
<beep> ‘11 – 11.15 pm | Mom to weep, our bathroom’
<beep> ‘That’s not funny, Mom.’
Did you know that you can take a scrape off your weekly family Google Calendar, once it’s solidified somewhat, and dump it into your Outlook to allow for any additional reverse Tetris you may need to do? I know this. I wish I didn’t.
Family obligations aside though – unless you want to call earning a wage a family obligation – I had 37 meetings last week. I told a friend this and she chuckled at me (quite condescendingly if I think about it now). “That’s ridiculous. You’re meeting away your whole life!”
She’s right, it is completely ridiculous. But sadly, I doubt I am alone in the beeping thrall of a Digital Diary of Despair.
I’m going to have to resort to the Diary Help button.
<beep> ‘9 am – 5 pm | Meeting, with me’
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