If it isn't diarised it isn't realised

📸 by Gustavo Fring on Pexels

I’m writing this at my weekly writers group. It’s a body-doubling session, a group of people who show up each week, on either side of a video call, to actually do the writing they keep almost doing. Books, articles, academic papers, blogs, Substack posts. Whatever needs time to be written and keeps not getting it.

I nearly didn’t come today.

Last night I discovered my personal calendar is dead. The one where I keep family plans, appointments, everything that isn’t client work. I spent the evening trying to fix it - me and my AI tech support - and the conclusion is it’s gone. Not recoverable. A few screenshots of the ghost of what was there, and that’s it.

This matters because my two diaries are how I run my life. They sync with my booking links, block out time I need to protect, and when they’re working properly they mean no double bookings, no five-message ping-pong to find a meeting time. The system is efficient and invisible - right up until it isn’t. Right up until half your data disappears and your booking link opens up your life to meetings you didn’t intend to be available for.

So this afternoon I had a choice. Fix the diary, or show up for the writing. And I’ve done this before - overruled the scheduled thing for the thing that’s pulled harder. The fire that is burning and needs putting out. It’s easy to justify. The diary disaster is urgent. The writing time is just... writing time.

If all we focus on is putting out fires…

I came to the writing.

And here’s why it matters, beyond this article existing at all. It’s not just about priorities. It’s about the muscle you’re building every time you make the call. The more you choose the fire over the important-but-not-urgent thing, the more you train yourself to keep choosing that. The diary disaster will still be there tonight. This window of time - this group, this hour and a half - is gone if I don’t use it now.

I have a client who’s been navigating this pattern for a while. He’s an experienced founder with a long-running business, and he’s exploring a new project - something separate, something he actually wants to give real time to. The problem is, he keeps snatching moments for it. An hour here, twenty minutes there. It’s not nothing, but it’s not enough either, and he knows it.

We talked about what it would look like to give it a real window? One day a month, blocked out properly. He’s actually good at protecting time for the things that feel non-negotiable - a family commitment, a holiday. He’d never let those get quietly displaced by a client call. But this project? It doesn’t feel that solid. Just a dream. It feels like something that could wait. So it does.

When I asked whether the time was actually in his diary, he went a bit quiet. It wasn’t.

That’s where the planning stops for a lot of people. There’s a step missing between ‘I’m going to do this’ and it actually happening - and that step is treating the commitment as real by scheduling it. Blocking the time. Telling clients you’re unavailable. Protecting it the same way you’d protect a holiday.

‘If it isn’t diarised it isn’t realised.’

I gave him that. He said it was true for him. He left and put it in the diary.

I’m finishing this post because I came today instead of fixing my calendar. My calendar will get sorted. It’ll be annoying but it’ll get fixed. And next week there’ll be something else pulling at this hour.

The diary disaster is real. But this - the writing, the commitment to it, the decision to treat it as non-negotiable even when it isn’t urgent - is the thing I’m trying to build.

What’s sitting in your ‘planning to do it’ pile that still hasn’t made it into the diary?