I am a consummate planner – I plan for every eventuality and usually get organised way in advance. Yes, I am the one who has the travel itinerary sorted out, the address and phone number logged and the paperwork ready 3 days in advance of any meeting! I can be spontaneous as well (and often take people by surprise when I am), but my default setting is planner!
It probably stems from being a working mum…any meeting had to be arranged around my boys and their childcare (when they were younger, of course, they don’t need that now!!). I suspect my mum would say I was the more organised one as a child, with homework always completed on Friday night, rather than leaving it until Monday morning!
So, I sometimes struggle to understand and get into the mindset of those ‘last minute dot com’ people…
Daniel has done that this morning – he waits until 8:10 to declare he wants to wear a particular pair of trousers, which are too long…when he has to leave for school at 8:15!!
Once upon a time I would have reacted by doing my absolute best to get trousers turned up, pinned up or sellotaped up in 5 minutes flat…today I knew it wasn’t going to happen in 5 minutes, so let it go!
We experience a lot of the last minute dot com set at work too…we sold 20% of the conference tickets in the 48 hours before the early bird deadline expired! And last year, we sold a couple of tickets on the day, which is great, but does kinda mess up the whole printed delegate badge, catering numbers etc!
I become curious about both mindsets…those who plan and those who spontaneously jump – and presumably those in the middle, who plan enough to know when the early bird deadline is and want to risk enough to see how close to the deadline they can get!
It is great fun to try on both types, although I wouldn’t recommend doing them simultaneously! I wonder what you could do today that is outside your usual ‘default’ setting?