My hope by now (if you’ve been reading my blog for a while) is that you have come to accept that I’m fairly organized and good at digital life management. It can be a fine line doing this and seeming to be knowledgeable without appearing arrogant. If I have, at any time, seemed like that, allow me to share with you a quick anecdote about how, despite being an “expert” in this field, I do mess it up every once and a while. I was chatting about this incident with one of my readers and He said: “oh you absolutely have to make this into a blog post!” Fair enough. For the purposes of this story, I’m going to be using different names and circumstances so that the person involved isn’t offended. I should also specify that 90% of what happened was in my own head…
I am, at my day job, in the process of developing a policy that I feel can really help my company. In order to get this policy put through I have to work closely with this one Director called “Rick”. Rick is a great guy and very approachable, so working with him is great. I e-mailed him about my thoughts on this policy that I’m working on, and he e-mailed me back saying “I have a couple of thoughts of my own, find some time in both our calendars and we’ll go through it.”
GREAT! I thought to myself. So I went into Outlook and I was able to pull up his calendar and find a time on his calendar later on that afternoon when we could both meet. So I set up an appointment for 3pm in his office and went about my day. I decided that I should prep for the meeting in case he had any questions. I got my presentation together and gathered up a few other materials that I thought that I would need. I wanted to be 100% for this meeting because with Rick’s approval I would be able to go to the next step.
3PM rolled around and I gathered my material for the meeting and walked to his office…He wasn’t there. I thought to myself Well he’s probably still at his last meeting and not able to get out of it yet. So I decided to wait for another 5 minutes. went back 5 minutes later, he still wasn’t there….this was odd. I went back to his office at 3:15 and he STILL wasn’t there.
I will admit I was starting to get frustrated with Rick. Here I was trying to develop this policy and he appeared willing to help, but when it came down to it he’d forgotten or didn’t think it was worth his time. I went back at 3:30 and he STILL wasn’t in his office. I was, at that point, really angry. Clearly, he wasn’t taking me seriously and I started to envision a real battle (again this was in my own head) trying to push this policy through. I mean, even if this first person couldn’t bother to meet with me then how was I supposed to get anything done!
I then settled down. Rick was a nice guy and he’s important in the company and really busy most of the time. I calmed down and decided just to re-schedule the meeting. No big deal I thought to myself. I pulled up my calendar in Outlook. I should mention before I go on that one of the cool features of Outlook is that if there are multiple people in your organization you can pull up their calendars as well. I like this because you can either see multiple calendars side by side or put them together by pressing an arrow on the other person’s name. Because the calendars have different colours you can tell when you and the other person or people have meetings or appointments throughout the day.
Anyway, I pulled up mine and Rick’s calendars and saw the meeting at 3….but oddly I didn’t see it on his calendar…..
So here’s the tip I feel compelled to mention. When you are scheduling a meeting with someone it’s usually a good practice to send them the meeting invite so that they know that there is a meeting as well. If you don’t remember to schedule a meeting WITH the actual person you will end up freaking out from 3:00 to 3:30 about them not being at a meeting that they knew nothing about….
Mia Culpa….
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