Let’s talk about calendars and scheduling, you know, all the cool things that people love talking about calendars and scheduling your daily Lex.

There’s a group of dads.

I like to have a meal out with every once in a while and we coordinate and go out to a dinner some evening.

One of my favorite times to get dinner, by the way, is the evening and the scheduling is such a cluster because everybody’s got busy lives and somebody will say, hey, what if we do this day?

And somebody will say, no, I can’t possibly do this day.

What about this other day?

And then nobody else can do that day.

And it’s a whole thing.

Or we’ll schedule one and then near the last minute somebody bails and then typically when somebody bails last minute, I guilt them and get them to come anyway.

But so we had been doing various permutations of these dinners for a bit and then summer came and scheduling went to hell.

So we were trying to get one of the books for September and it looks like the September one is going to happen in October because that’s how good we are at scheduling.

So that’s been fun.

But it’s worth it, right?

But it’s amazing how hard it can be to schedule stuff.

For me, if a thing is not on my calendar, I don’t do it.

So my workday calendar is typically structured with meetings that are all throughout the day and then work.

I put work in blocks throughout the day.

But of course with the work blocks, I always know how urgent that work is and so sometimes you can be on a different thing and then my alert pops up, hey, do the work for this client.

I can’t do that right now.

So I drag it all around.

But if I don’t have it on my calendar, it’s never going to happen because I need to have the calendar reminder or the reserve time to do the thing.

And once I’ve moved a meeting, a work meeting, an internal meeting for myself of doing the actual thing, once I’ve moved it too many times, I know I got to just do that thing because now it’s getting close to procrastinating and I don’t like procrastinating.

The way I work with most of my clients, speaking of calendars and time and meetings, is they commit to me for some minimum number of hours each month and we use those hours for whatever they want.

It could be meetings, it could be work I’m doing on their behalf, whatever.

And my setup is because you’ve reserved those numbers of hours with me, you’re going to pay me for those hours each month even if you don’t use them all.

And I don’t really roll them over because I have to know how much time I’m allocating.

So my goal isn’t to get paid for hours I don’t work, my goal is to figure out the right number of hours on a per client basis so that I can work that number of hours for them.

And it tends to work out pretty well.

Every once in a while, you know, someone doesn’t use their whole hours and okay, that’s fine.

Sometimes I also go over a little bit and that can be fine too.

If it gets exorbitant in either direction, we adjust.

No big deal.

I had a fairly new client recently and our first one hour meeting after we, you know, we’d set up, obviously we had had some initial meetings to figure out how we’d work together, we got it all done.

And then our first initial one hour meeting, he missed.

About 10 minutes into the meeting, I emailed him, I was like, I’m so sorry I’m running late, I’ll be there soon.

And then he’s like, I’ll be there, I’ll be there after 20 minutes.

So it’ll only be 40 minutes of our session, but we can just treat that like an hour.

I’m like, okay, don’t worry about it, let’s just, let’s figure it out.

And then more time goes by and he doesn’t show and he’s like, I’ve really screwed this up.

I’m really sorry.

I understand.

Charge me for this hour and we’ll figure it out.

And normally that’s exactly what I would do, right?

Like you missed an hour, it’s booked.

That’s time that I reserved for you like that.

That’s an hour that I’ve committed to you, especially when you’re saying, Hey, I’m coming.

So I hung out.

In this case, it’s a brand new client and I don’t love the idea of starting out the relationship like, Hey, you got to pay me for my doing nothing, but we scheduled some other time and he missed it.

And yeah, so he missed the second slot and he’s like, Oh my God, I realized how ridiculous I must look, but I’m a functional, normal person and it’s just been a crazy confluence of events.

I’m like, Hey, no problem.

Let’s just reschedule again.

And we had a good meeting.

Great.

And then today we had a meeting at the Gallaudet Asian show and I wrote to him like, Hey, just checking in.

I canceled this one and scheduled another one.

And then he wrote back a minute or two later saying, Hmm, I thought about doing those things and didn’t do it.

So it’s all fine.

It’s all working out.

I’m taking care of me and mine and we’re, we’re, we’re sorting it out.

But it was just kind of a funny way to start with a brand new client because, you know, missing a bunch of meetings was like, what exactly is happening right now?

And you know, obviously we’ll have to invoice you at the end of the month and what exactly are you paying me for?

The joy of missing meetings and exchanging emails.

I’m in, I’m in scheduling craziness right now because I’m trying to sort out what my, my non-work life situation is going to look like in terms of what, let’s call them extracurriculars.

I’m going to be involved in more on that soon.

I can’t go into detail on exactly what I mean, but attentive listeners can figure out what I’m referencing at least and some things aren’t public yet, but still figuring all that out and how you can make all the scheduling work.

But yeah, I really do love my calendar and in case you’re curious, I use fantastic L for most of my calendar needs with Google calendar behind the scenes.

And sometimes a little bit of iCloud calendar, but not really.

I rely on Google for my calendar syncing just because it’s what I’ve always done.

So now, you know, anyway, that’s my exciting calendar updates for the day.

Happy Monday, which is what my calendar says it is Lex.