Hindsight and Learning New Things

I am in the middle of a very big event I'm planning. We are just a few weeks away from the event and I am way behind on many tasks, particularly publicity.

When we decided to do this event a year ago we knew nothing about doing these things.

Now that I'm almost to the deadline, I realize there is so much that we could have done better.

We should have been doing a lot of publicity work and planning a good 6-8 months ago but we didn't start on some of these until much closer to time (and are still finishing some of them).

It's hard to know when you start a new project, especially something big you've never done before, just how hard it is going to be or what you need to do in advance. Unfortunately, a lot of this you learn too late, through making mistakes.

Hindsight is one of those frustrating things--sure, you have learned something important but sometimes it doesn't feel like enough. It won't help with this event and this event is what matters to me right now. I may never do another event like this, especially if this one fails because my lack of experience caused me to underestimate the work and not get things done in time.

I enjoy learning new things (I learned InDesign this year and have made some really nice projects since then) but the sort of things one learns by making mistakes and then realizing (through hindsight) what should have been done–well, I don't think I am the first person to dislike that sort of learning.

All I can do is to try to make up for my mistakes on the current project, the best I can, and to hope that some future project will benefit from the lessons learned here.

Hindsight is great in the future when it is a life lesson but it sure sucks when it is currently coming to you.