I am not responsible for other people's systems

If you haven't visited NicoleDiekerFinley.com recently, you may want to check out the revamp. ❤️

Back when I was an executive assistant, which was long enough ago that I don't really think about it all that often, my boss would have me send reminder emails the day before any scheduled meeting or event.

(This is to say that my boss asked me to complete this task as a default, which meant that every time I set a meeting I also set myself a note to send the meeting reminder. If my boss had had to remind me to remind people about the meetings, I wouldn't have been a very good executive assistant.)

This was, by the way, not so long ago that Outlook didn't also send the automated reminder email – but since people had already been trained to ignore Microsoft messages, I needed to send the personalized one.

Every time I did it – which is to say not quite every time, but often enough to remember for this retelling – I would ask myself why I had been tasked to assume that the recipient of my message did not have their own trustworthy time-management system.

Undoubtedly it was because they didn't, or because my boss didn't trust that they did.

But –

you know –

why not?

As soon as I became a freelancer, I stopped sending reminder emails. This included reminders to people I was scheduled to interview, even though I knew it was the industry standard to send those kinds of reminders because I received them nearly every time someone scheduled me for something. "Just checking in to make sure we're still on target for Wednesday at 10:30 Eastern!"

Interestingly, very few of my scheduled interviews failed to proceed as scheduled. Every once in a while I would call someone who had forgotten that I was going to call, but that only happened once or twice a year. (Either time-management systems had gotten better during the jump in technology between 2008 and 2012, or the people I was interviewing for various finance-related articles were extremely motivated to keep their appointments.)

The point is –

and there is a point, I promise you –

well, the point is that I learned one of those extraordinary Secrets of Life at two-in-the-morning last night, and now I'm going to tell you what it is.