Reviewing My Mistakes

27 Nov 2019 at 19:33 // under Personal

Back in August, I made a mistake. Part of me wants to forget all about it. Ignore it, pretend that it didn't happen.

But I have been fairly vocal that we should be learning from our mistakes and ideally, learning from other people's mistakes. If course that only works if people are honest about their mistakes and think about what happened critically, working out why the error occurred and what can be done to stop it happen again in the future. With that in mind, I am posting about my mistake here, in full.

What happened?

I was invited to an event down in London. The event was scheduled to end quite late so I didn't want to try and catch a late plane. My options were staying overnight and catching a train the following day or to use the sleeper train.

I opted for the sleeper train and booked my tickets down and back. Unfortunately I managed to get mixed up and booked the tickets for the wrong day. As a result I am out of pocket and am unable to attend the event.

Why?

What lead to me making the mistake? I was trying to rush booking the tickets during a break. I had mostly booked them previously but had been forced to stop an start again. I may have gotten confused with the sleeper traveling over midnight, and finishing on a different day than it started. I may have had the wrong event date in my head when I was booking the tickets.

These are all possible reasons, but on their own they don't help much. To benefit, I need to answer the next question.

What can I do to avoid making this mistake again?

The simplest and guaranteed way is to completely eliminate the situation. Refuse to book any travel arrangements in future. While simple, it is not ver practical. I would miss out on events and opportunities in the future. If we still need to go somewhere as a family, I would simply be forcing my wife to make the booking, and forcing her to take the risk of making the mistake. Is there anything better we can do?

The time pressure was probably the biggest contributing factor. By simply waiting till I had enough time, I wouldn't have been under as much pressure. I would have had more if a chance to check everything.

Another check worth doing would be to put everything in my calendar before I hit submit. Put the events I am attending in first. Double check all these. Then when booking transport it accomodation, put these in the calendar and check everything looked bed up before hitting the final submit button.

I believe that if I had done these things, I wouldn't have ended up in the situation I did last night. I certainly don't want to repeat that again.

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