When scheduling is trash
Differential diagnosis for a case of internal resistance
This morning, a friend asked me for help with something weird she was experiencing.
Recently, this friend–we’ll call her Lila—had entirely stopped keeping track of her appointments and commitments.
This might not be much of a shift for most of us, but it was a strange development for Lila.
Over the past 10 years or so, she has more or less single-handedly raised a kid while working a constantly changing schedule as a social worker. Meanwhile, she also helped run the community preschool, threw the middle-school graduation party for her son’s entire class, and organised the village Scarecrow Festival (yes, really). She’s the kind of person who will ask you in November what you are doing on a certain weekend in June, because she’s getting some plans nailed down.
And now this entire aspect of her personality seemed to have gone on hiatus more or less overnight. She had stopped putting things into her calendar, setting reminders on her phone or updating what had previously been a series of running lists covering everything from child activities to home repairs. Which meant she had started missing appointments, double booking and forgetting about important events.
The tipping point came when a friend showed up at Lila’s door one evening last week. She couldn’t imagine why, until her friend reminded her that their regularly scheduled book club was about to start. Lila had also forgotten about the snacks she had volunteered to bring, because she’d forgotten about book club night—which she’d attended for years—entirely.
After the book-club incident, Lila decided she had to get serious about putting things in her planner again. Not only was behaving so unlike herself disorienting as hell, but also some of the things she was forgetting about she really wanted to do. What was falling off her radar wasn’t just her obligations. It was also her fun.
So last night, she vowed to herself that she’d spend the first part of today getting all her time commitments written down. She wanted to revert to her old ways.
When she woke up, though, she couldn’t find her planner. Eventually she discovered it sitting on top of the kitchen trash can. Although she had no memory of putting it there, this was apparently where she had decided it belonged the night before.
It seemed like a clear message: some part of her brain had decided that scheduling was basically garbage.
That’s when she decided to see what I would suggest.
Because Lila knows how I work, she knew I wasn’t going to give her tips on how to change her approach to scheduling or how to come at her to-do lists in a way that would be more enabling. She knew my solution would be to figure out why exactly her brain had started to resist keeping track of her schedule. So she was already asking the right questions. She just hadn’t been able to find an answer on her own.
To get there, we leveraged the kind of logical analysis I do with my clients all the time. In order to identify why resistance is happening, we whittle our way down to what is specific about the given situation that distinguishes it from other moments. So, for example, if Lila was able to schedule things fine last month, we would start to look at what has changed between then and now. If the resistance to planning applied to everything outside work but not to work itself, we would consider what her brain associates with time off that it doesn’t associate with her job. And so on.
What we’re doing is a kind of differential diagnosis, except it’s focused on brain shenanigans instead of some sort of exotic disease that only the team of House M.D. can identify. It’s one of my jobs as a coach to ask the questions that enable us to separate the signal from the noise, to isolate exactly what is causing the big red INITIATE INTERNAL RESISTANCE sign in your brain to fire up in this particular case.
Because I know Lila is dealing with ongoing child custody issues—which of course often revolve around scheduling—I immediately wondered if that situation could somehow be involved. When I raised this possibility, I could hear something in her voice that told me we were on the right track, if not quite there. I asked a few more whittling-it-down questions, and soon I could tell we’d discovered the issue.
Lila’s brain was not interested in planning because at the moment it felt like she couldn’t really plan on time with her son.
Without that option, her brain had noped out of the entire idea of plans. In fact, making plans when she couldn’t easily include her child felt like co-signing a situation she was 100% determined not to accept.
In a very real way, her brain was right: plans for her life that didn’t include her son actually were trash. So of course it made sense to go on strike, scheduling-wise.
Once we recognised that, we were able to help her brain see that throwing out the planner wasn’t actually the only option. In fact, many of the things she was failing to note down she had never done with her son, so it seemed feasible that she could reclaim them. I also suggested she make some lists of things she would do with her son once arrangements were clearer, just to remind her brain that not all planning was bad.
When I texted her to see if she minded me sharing this story with you, she told me she had already managed to recover the planner from on top of the trash can and start putting all her current events and commitments into it.
I wanted to share this story because it’s a perfect encapsulation of why I am always preaching the gospel of INVESTIGATION at you and reminding you of how good you are at pattern recognition and puzzle solving.
Lila could have spent the next six months trying to bully herself into being great at scheduling again She could have tried a dozen systems and dropped a hundred pounds on new planners—and still found herself answering the door in her PJs when she was supposed to be rocking up at book club with a platter full of snacks.
Instead, just by assuming her brain had good reasons for its resistance and looking for them skilfully and carefully, we were able to resolve the issue in 15 minutes while drinking our Saturday morning coffee.
This doesn’t mean Lila isn’t worried and upset about the larger situation, but she doesn’t have to sabotage her preferred level of organisation as a result. She can deal with those feelings directly and still put the comedy show she’s excited about on her calendar. She can actually remember to show up for the things that will help her get through this crappy time.
It’s amazing how much faster we can stop doing something unhelpful, once we actually figure out why the fuck we were doing it in the first place.
