Practical ways I’ve learnt from experience to avoid disappointment in your use of time.
Try to have a plan for your time even if you actually have no formal plan that you’ve booked or arranged. (If you do, of course you should stick to that plan.) Even if it’s just a rough idea of what you’d like to achieve that day or afternoon, it’s enough to help in your decision making if other things come up. If something really fun comes up, of course you can just put your idea to the side since it’s not booked. But having an idea that you can put into action helps you be less disappointed if other things don’t turn out fun.
Examples from my own experiences
Following are some examples of this where I’ve learnt to try to do this or learnt that I should have in hindsight.
Solo Travelling
Say you’re travelling for a party but want the rest of the night to yourself, maybe think about setting a time limit so you can still have time to travel or chill. Even if you are happy to stay the whole time, be firm with yourself that you plan to chill by yourself or whatever. Then you can tell people you can’t go changing venues because it’s late and you want to settle in or take some sightseeing time. I discovered this in hindsight by only doing half of this and not having enough time to sightsee and chill. In the end it didn’t really matter - but I was a bit disappointed still.
Dating
When you’re at a party or gathering as a couple, you should discuss how long you want to stay at the party and what you want to do afterwards. Discuss in advance in what circumstances you will stay late or go earlier even and why. This way you and the partner can still have some couple time together after the party. I’ve found setting an alarm on the phone helps so you don’t get carried away with the party. When we, as a couple, haven’t made a plan for the time after the party, we’ve ended up not having enough quality time together. But when we planned our time together, we had time for both the activities and quality time together.
When having a date night or a date, it’s good to have some reasonable idea of what you want to do afterwards, a second plan you’d be ok enough with, and also something you can do that is ok if they don’t want either (but this is for you not for them). Then you can tell them, “I’d like to do such and such, but if you’d rather not then we can do such and such else, how’s that? Otherwise it’s ok, I can do (my own thing that I enjoy ok).”
If it’s established dating, this is when you have some rough plans and expectations which you could convey to them, but provide them with options that you are ok with too. Ask them what they want to do as well!
If it’s a first date or meeting, I’ve learnt to allow the whole morning or afternoon, but have a secret idea to do, so if the date isn’t going well, you can bail out with a firm escape plan (grocery shopping before it’s too busy or something). But if it is going well then you can just keep going. I discovered this by not having a secret shopping plan so I ended up allowing myself to get roped into seeing a movie I didn’t want to. (Though it was a nice enough movie.)
Closing thoughts
With all of these examples, there was an actual incident that happened that I had in mind when I wrote about it, and crucially the consequences were low at the individual situation level (but still disappointing at the time). But…. Over time doing this simple planning or not can positively impact your relationship or slowly drag it down. Individually if you got wrapped up in something and one time didn’t have enough couple or solo time it doesn’t matter, you can make it up soon after. But then if you don’t make it up or this happens a lot, you could become unhappy or build resentment.
I like to write this to help me integrate my own experiences into my mind, and I hope that publishing it can help you or others too!
[Featured Image DALL-E 3 Prompt: a male and female looking their watches and phone planning to avoid disappointment after event in cartoon style]