Welcome to Overcommitment Anonymous. We are men and women who have come together to share our strength and our pain in overcoming overcommitment.
      We have scheduled an extra hour a day for meetings to accomplish this.
    This is our program:
  1. We recognized that our schedule was completely out of control, and that being in three different cities at two o'clock on Tuesday was probably never going to be physically possible.
  2. We came to believe that a Higher Power could help us out of the chaos.
  3. We made a decision to turn our lives over to our Higher Power, who has more control over space-time than we do.
    3a. We admitted that even a Higher Power probably won't be able to help us be in three places at once.
    3c. We admitted that this giving up control thing was going to take awhile.
    3d. We skipped 3b because we were busy with another project just then.
  4. We made a searching moral inventory of every time we have scheduled 46 hours out of 24, promised to deliver a project the next morning that would require a week of work, scheduled a two hour meeting at 9 AM and another one at 9:30 AM, eaten lunch at our desk, slept on the office floor, slept on our keyboard, gone without sleep, and generally overextended ourselves. Even when it was fun.
  5. We shared this moral inventory with at least one other person who would give us enough time to listen to the whole thing, which proved to be a useful way to identify other candidates for Overcommitment Anonymous.
  6. We became entirely ready to have our Higher Power remove all these shortcomings and make us content with accomplishing what human strength can do in 24 hours of normal spacetime.
  7. We humbly asked our Higher Power to please do so while we still have some human strength left.
    NOTE: Most of us are still coming up with qualifying clauses for Step Six. (aka Step Sux)
  8. We made a list of everyone who has ever been adversely affected by waiting for us in Omaha Nebraska because we were sure we could get to New Jersey and back in two hours, or any other overcommitment we ever made.
  9. We committed ourselves to making amends to all of these people.
  10. We assured our Higher Power that yes, we will allow longer than 24 hours to do it all and will not try to make all amends at the same time.
  11. We sought through prayer, meditation and daily Net searches to find calendar software that will slap our hands whenever we overbook our bods.
  12. Having had an Awakening of some sort or another as the result of these Steps, we try daily to carry the message to other sufferers --

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Thursday, 17-Jan-2002 07:35:56 EST