“Your next blog: Is it over committing or under prioritizing?”

That was the text that I received from Jensen on Friday, November 16th. I had cancelled lunch plans with some of the guys that morning after waffling the day before. I sent a text indicating that I had over committed myself and had to take care of some things at the office.

Sure, Jensen was teasing me and most likely laughing when he wrote it. He knew how much it would bother me.

Getting the boys together is one of those things that gives me a ton of energy. We have a really good crew of lifelong friends and we spark creativity in each other, razz each other for stupid decisions, and do a lot of laughing. Finding the time to get together is getting harder and harder.
My work calendar was wide open when we made the plans and I have been trying to keep personal commitments as much as possible.

Did I over commit or under prioritize? This is one of the questions that I struggle with every day. Balancing activities with friends, family, and especially with the girls; while trying to exceed client expectations, grow an account, strengthen the firm, develop our team, and invest in my own self-development. My word for 2019 is commitment and it applies to all of the above… but has to be handled with care.

One of my challenge is that I’m the king of creating lists of things that I am going to do on a given day (like most of you reading this blog). I have them in categories and usually in the order of importance. However, I seldom apply any constraints to completing them. That means accounting for how long they are going to take or how much time I actually have in the day to get them done. Combine that with the fact that I really like to talk and engage with the girls, it usually results in some late nights.

Unfortunately, it seemes to be the immediate and tactical things that fall into the over committing category. All those things that old people try and tell young people to not take for granted, and say that they regret the most later in life, tend to fall in the under prioritizing category.

Three months later, the question of over committing and under prioritizing hit me in the face again. I actually told Katie that maybe I needed to skip the weekly Sunday night dinner with her family because I have some homework and a few big presentations due this week. I thought it through and after remembering the question, I refocused and shifted the way that I approached the day and made it to dinner.

So even though we didn’t end up having lunch that day in November, the insight and the lesson from one of my best friends made its mark, even if it was just a text.

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