I was very happy to hand over the scheduling of blog posts to the task management tool Asana, just so I could both keep up with a regular number each week, but also to keep track of what I had already written. (I actually started to write a post last week that I had already written.) And I was glad to rely on Asana’s recurring task feature to automatically schedule, for example, a new post #4 to recur a week after the last #4 was completed.

Imagine my surprise this weekend when I discovered that task #4 got deleted a few weeks ago, and never rescheduled. I guess I hadn’t noticed, since task #3 might be drafted on a Monday, and task #5 (which should have been #4) was written on a Wednesday, and I wasn’t paying close enough attention to see the missing post.

There is a lesson here, about relying too much on automation to keep track of everything for us, or outsmarting myself with too-smart tools, but perhaps I am not the one to write that.

I finally noticed after having an odd feeling about something missing. Perhaps my inner navigator noticed the missing #4, but I went looking and found — and closed — that gap.