I have a precarious relationship with my calendar. I keep a digital calendar, of course, but our family also has an old-school paper calendar hanging on the wall (this year it features photos from the Webb telescope). We all write our meetings, classes, concerts, games, and appointments on it, and we all check it daily so we know who’s going to be where. Looking at the filled-in squares that make up March, I knew I was going to be in trouble because I was over-committed.
The trouble started when the date of the special Town Meeting came out, and it coincided with a concert I was going to with my best friend for his 50th birthday. I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to handle that, but I still prepared for Town Meeting and the concert as if I could magically be in two places at once. I then had to postpone a middle school PTO event I was organizing to Thursday night after Town Meeting due to a participant’s illness. That was fine until it became clear Town Meeting was going to run into a second night.
I was double-booked, multiple nights in a row. It’s likely a familiar problem for many of us. We talk a lot about work/life balance, but the “life” part of that can get complicated in middle age, and being out of balance doesn’t just mean you’re spending too much time at work. Many of us can break that “life” section into multiple subsections: parenting, volunteering, and, if we’re lucky, a social life. Even some of those subsections can be subdivided further. That week, my life subsections intersected and intertwined, creating a scheduling nightmare.
I was plotting an elaborate scheme to somehow vote at Town Meeting from the concert when my friend texted to tell me he’d hurt his foot and couldn’t go. His husband, who was also going, wrote that he was going to try to “rally” despite being exhausted from his own hectic day. I wrote back: “You shouldn’t have to rally. Let’s just call it.” So we did. I no longer had to clone myself. Town Meeting may not have been as fun as a concert, but it did have its moments. And that PTO event on Thursday? I also canceled that when I realized that many of the participants were also obligated to go to Town Meeting or were double-booked for other reasons.
The worried knots in my stomach unraveled as I realized that sometimes the best plan is to cancel plans. Among my primary responsibilities at my job is prioritizing projects for the organization. I can talk to our executive team about each team’s capacity and delay, cancel, or greenlight million-dollar projects for our 100+-person nonprofit, but I don’t always exercise those skills in my own life.
It’s not an easy task. Due to those “subsections” of life, prioritizing can be challenging. There is a temptation to always put the things you need to do over the things you want to do, but that’s not really sustainable. Even erasing work from the equation, you still need to maintain a life/life/life balance.
Which is why, on that Friday of what had been a very busy week (even with the canceled events), I planned…nothing. It was a big white empty square on the calendar, and I kept it that way. The only people I talked to were my wife and kids. I vegged out, watching a movie and reading my book. It was glorious. I’m going to make an effort to keep some more white squares on my calendar.
Eric J. Perkins writes about Gen X for The Belmont Voice. When he’s not writing, he’s the Director of Transformation at Addgene, a life sciences nonprofit in Watertown.