You could check! You live in a science world and have this luxury! You could attempt to do, like, math problems or something more analogous to your usual work tasks if there is such a thing, with and without a headache.

"I guess...?" Vanyel seems dubious. "I'll do that." 

Good! And even if you don't wind up with fewer headaches because you're too irreplaceable or something, it suggests things about how you should order or time headache-inducing tasks if you have that flexibility, if the headache will make you worse at whatever comes after.

"I mean, I don't get to time emergency Farsight checks, they're emergencies. But, um, I could probably try to do that more in general." It seems like the concept of deliberately trying to rearrange his own schedule instead of just doing it in the order presented hasn't occurred to him before either. 

Sure, you can't time emergencies, but it'd tell you whether to postpone anything that comes after them.

"I guess I could maybe do that. If it's just me doing mage-work then I'm not really letting someone down if I do it later than I planned to. As long as I still do it. I just...feel guilty about it anyway." 

How come?

"I, um, I guess it feels like if I were better at things I wouldn't have to put them off like that." 

Do you happen to know how other Heralds work out their schedules? I don't.

"Not really." Squirm. "Savil moves her schedule around sometimes but, er, usually it's to rescue me when I need to cancel on lessons or something." 

Just because that's what she uses that flexibility for doesn't mean that it's what everyone uses it for, or that only she actually has it.

"Mmm." Vanyel does agree that probably no one will try to stop him from moving things around that aren't urgent and aren't inconveniencing other people by doing so. 

Hm?

"What? Oh, I mean, I agree, I can try rescheduling things more when people don't mind." 

What about when they do mind?

Vanyel curls up. "I don't want to annoy people any more than I already do." 

How much do you think you currently annoy people?

"I don't know exactly but it has to annoy people some when I don't do things that I committed to doing at the time I said. Tran was really patient about covering for me on the relay but I think he must've been a bit annoyed that I was so flaky about it." 

So you're guessing.

"I mean, I haven't asked, I think asking would be annoying." 

Sure, I don't especially think you should ask instead of guessing, but I think if what you're doing is guessing you should be aware of that.

"That's fair enough." 

So you guess you have annoyed people in the past with scheduling changes. It might be useful to calibrate on what some random other Herald does in this department as a benchmark. Tran or Savil aren't random but I guess they might be more appropriate baseline comparisons since they have more comparable abilities and duties to yours.

Nod. "I...don't think I've paid enough attention. I can sit down with Yfandes later and try to go through it for the last few months, she has a better memory." 

That's a good idea.