Forgot about a meeting.

Oh dear, sorry to hear that Bunny - but thank you for sharing.

You've hit the nail on the head there, thank you so much for commenting.

Interesting, thank you for sharing.

I'm normally very good with time keeping which is why I'm beating myself up.

If I don't put something on my calendar straightaway I forget, or I get the time and date mixed up evan as I'm writing it, more than once I've had to phone to confirm the time and date.

I wonder if because we know our own weaknesses with time keeping we beat ourselves up too much?

Oh dear Iain and your marvy lists, thanks! List clarify everything!

I struggle with these things every day and spend way more time at organizing, so I don't get tripped up, than the average bear. When I slip up, it rankles, of yes. I have come to terms with allowing more time for everything and not adding on more than is comfortable: like not having more than one medical appointment in the same week, get a small routines together that I can use to anchor. I still drop a plate now and then in my juggling act to keep up but I don't get mad at myself anymore for it.

A strange side effect of this is that, when I get it right and show up, at great mental cost, only for the other party to have gotten it wrong or that they triy to change it at "last minute"  I get very angry, inordinately so. This was more when I was younger and had few tools to cope. At those times I would seethe, go back to a private place and break things and let fly pointless invectives. 

This had been very hard for me to control - but - these days I have extra tools for that too that I have borrowed from Buddhism, Iching, meditation and binaural sound therapy on my headphones. The Dharma saved my life.

Bunny said:

I beat myself up about that one for a long, long time! 

I know that feeling, but reflecting on the use of this sort of self flagellation is actually really counterproductive.

I learned a much more effective technique in management training courses over the years that is much more useful, and it is really simple.

1 - Perform an analysis of the event. What happened, what went well and what went wrong.

2 - Consider the possible options that could have been used to prevent the situation and if they were available to you at the time.

3 - Create a "lessons learned" outcome from the review. What went well can be reused in future and for the things that went wrong, how to treat them in future.

The "how to treat them in future" has 4 options to it:

Consider booking a weekend break and the risk is you need to cancel it:

1 - Accept. This means you say something like "well my memory is rubbish so it may happen and I'll live with it".

2 - Share. This means you have someone who agrees that they will also keep an eye on it with you in case you forget. This does not mean you should just forget however.

3 - Mitigate. This means taking steps to make the impact less painful or less of a hit. It may involve chosing a hotel that has a half fee if you are a no-show for example.

4 - Avoid. This means finding a way that there is no fee to pay. Maybe it is finding a hotel with a no-show, no pay policy, agreeing a confirmation date cutoff where if you don't contact them then it is cancelled etc.

5 - Transfer. This is where you get someone else to do it all and they remind you nearer the time. Typically it is a third party to the family and you have a conract with them so they take the financial hit if they fail.

It is worth keeping these in your email or cloud storage so you can dig it out when you need to do it again - no need to reinvent the wheel.

There you go - that is how the professionals do it and once you have done one or two it is really easy.

There's definitely that double impact of things when others don't know you're struggling so you have the actual problem and also that to deal with too.

I go through phases of being very much focussed on things that everything else gets forgotten, don't beat yourself up about it, just try and laugh it off if you can.

I think in times of stress out defence mechanism kicks in and that reduces our focus down to just  the "threat" , meaning we've got little to no bandwidth to deal with other stuff.

Definitely - and it can be a costly problem! We once got back from staying in a B&B on a mini-break to find an emailed bill from a big brand hotel that I'd originally made a booking with, but had forgotten to cancel. I beat myself up about that one for a long, long time!