Why I Keep Appointments With Others and Miss the Ones With Myself

My daughter's blue schoolbag sits on the back seat, its strap looped over the gear stick. A quarter to seven, and the motorbike is already parked at the school gate. It has been like this almost every morning for three years, rain or not, even the days a problem on the building site started in the night. The teacher opens the gate at a quarter to seven, and I have never once let my daughter wait alone.

Same man, and yet the running shoes I bought at the start of the year are still in their box, the box on top of the shoe cabinet. I make an appointment with myself three times a week. Every week I make it. All told I make a great many and keep very few.

If you are like this, if you keep your word to your boss, your clients, your mother, even the old friends' group chat, while the appointments you make with yourself drift by like torn-off calendar pages, I understand the faint shame that comes with it. I used to conclude straight away that I was weak-willed. That conclusion never once helped me lace up a shoe.

This is about one very small spot in the way I make appointments with myself, and one way to adjust it that does not need extra resolve.

It is not that I value other people above myself. That explanation sounds deep, and it sends you looking for a large lesson about self-love, when the broken part may be much smaller: an appointment with yourself usually has no shape yet.

How do the two appointments differ?

Thursday evening, my colleague Khoa sent one line on Zalo: tomorrow at half past seven, the coffee shop at the end of the street, he would hand me a roll of drawings. I replied with one word, "ok". No alarm, no note. The next morning I was there at twenty-five past seven, my iced milk coffee not yet watered down.

That same Thursday evening, before bed, I told myself: tomorrow, a run. Three words. The next morning I woke up, remembered, thought "this afternoon", and in the afternoon the site called.

The easiest explanation is that I am more afraid of letting other people down than of letting myself down. Perhaps partly true. But if you stop there, the only fix is to scold yourself harder, and I tried that for years.

Looked at closely, the two appointments differ in very concrete things. The one with Khoa had a time: half past seven. It had a place: the coffee shop at the end of the street. It had someone waiting: a real person holding a roll of paper, glancing at a watch. "Tomorrow, a run" has no answer for when tomorrow is, where the run happens, or who would know if I skipped it. Nobody. And an appointment missed without anyone knowing leaves no trace, so the next morning nothing is there to nudge it awake. It does not get punished, it just quietly disappears, and each disappearance is as light as the last.

My daughter puts this better than I do.

"Dad, tomorrow pick me up early, okay?"

"Early is what time?"

"When the teacher lines us up for the gate. You stand by the flagpole, where the tree shadow is."

I laughed. She had just made an appointment with a time, a place and someone waiting, and she is only six.

The first time, most people find it stiff, like drawing up a formal record of a trifle. I did too. After about a week, some people see their own gaps more clearly: it turns out I missed it where the time was vague, not where I was lazy. Others do it all week and notice nothing different, and that is normal too. On a very busy day keep just two things, the time and the place, and drop the rest.

The easiest place to go wrong is making it too big. I once wrote "five kilometres every morning", because that was the appointment of the person I wanted to become, not of the one sitting here at six in the morning. An appointment like that has every part of a shape and still gets missed, because it was made with the wrong person. The second is turning "the person who knows" into a guard, asking someone to message you every morning to push you out. Then the appointment with yourself becomes an appointment with the pusher, and the day they are busy it vanishes with them. The one who knows only needs to know, not to punish.

Where does the appointment go once it is missed?

There is something I have not said yet: on the days I missed, I usually deleted the whole appointment. Monday missed, Tuesday missed, by Wednesday I thought forget it, start again properly next week.

Next week is a very comfortable place to lie down. Nobody can say what time next week is.

The familiar explanation is that I lack perseverance. But looking back at how I keep appointments with other people, it looks very different. When I am late for a client, I message at once: "Sorry, stuck in traffic, ten more minutes." The appointment is still there, just moved a little. Nobody cancels the whole meeting because of a traffic jam. With myself I do the opposite: miss one session and I treat the whole plan as broken, then wait for a clean start that never arrives.

I tried something else, slightly funny at first. I spoke to myself in exactly the voice I use to message a client: "Missed today, tomorrow is still half past six, still at the doorstep." It sounds like something I read elsewhere, about talking to yourself the way you would to a close friend, and it is exactly that, only this time it has a time and a place.

Two small things stayed with me from then on. First, when I miss, I do not delete the appointment, I just report the miss and leave the same time for tomorrow. Second, an act with a fixed place is easier to remember than an act with only an intention. Shoes at the doorstep are easier to remember than "go for a run tonight", just as making your bed every morning is easy to remember because the blanket is already lying there.

There is a trap that follows, and I fell into it for exactly one week. I started logging misses like debts: miss three, owe three sessions. An appointment that was meant to be somewhere to return to turned into a bill, and I began avoiding it again. Let a missed day be just a missed day. If you need reminding that rest is nothing to be ashamed of, the piece on permitting yourself to rest without guilt says it more fully than I can.

If you did all this and still missed

It happens, and it does not mean you did it wrong.

The most common reason is that the appointment is not yours. A friend of mine promised herself ten pages of a book every morning, and it turned out she believed people ought to read, not that she wanted to. Time, place and a person who knows were all there, and she still missed, because the fault sat in the content, not the shape. At that point change the appointment, not the way you blame yourself.

The second reason is that the time you chose does not fit your days. I once set six in the morning while two nights a week I fell asleep close to two, and I blamed myself for a month. Moving it to the evening eased everything. A time is only a number, it has to fit your day and not your picture of a good day.

And if you keep missing because of tiredness or sadness that has lasted many weeks, to the point where every small thing feels heavy, that is something to bring to a professional, not something to fix by adjusting an appointment. An appointment with a shape cannot replace that.

Tomorrow morning, a quarter to seven, I will still be standing at the school gate, where the tree shadow falls.

The shoes I have already set at the doorstep.