You need a calendar. It can be a paper-based calendar if you prefer. If so, I highly suggest it be a “One page per day” style calendar. Another good one is the Moleskine Weekly Planner+Notes that I used for years before I went digital. You are going to need space to write a lot of thing because you are a busy person and if you start using the calendar the way I am going to suggest, you will soon realize how busy you really are.
Personally, I prefer a digital calendar for a few reasons.
- It can sync between different devices to always be available to me.
- It can be backed up so that if I lose a device (drop my phone, laptop gets stolen, get caught in the rain without an umbrella, whatever) I do not lose my calendar for very long.
- It can expand and contract according to my needs at the moment. I can easily see how busy a day, week, month, or year is. In November, when my dentist wants me to schedule my next appointment six months out, I do not have to think about if I have purchased next year’s calendar yet.
- It can be with me at ALL times. It fits in my pocket. If I have pants on, it is never more than an arms length away. This is a big one. Because my calendar is a trusted part of my system, I count on it to remember lots of things so that my mind can do more important things than remember that I will be at the dentist six months from now.
Not only do you need a calendar, but you need exactly ONE calendar. This is a heated point of contention between my special lady friend and I. She is a paper calendar girl. She insists on having a calendar at work (which stays at work) and one at home (which stays at home). When she is at work, she has no reminder that tonight we have reservations at that special restaurant or that she can’t take an early meeting next monday because of that dentist appointment she scheduled six months ago. When she is at home, it is the same. She has no reminder not to schedule that dentist appointment because that is the Monday morning when she needs to go into work early for that quarterly meeting.
I used to be the same way in my digital calendar. I had a school calendar, a work calendar, a band practice calendar, a home calendar, a teaching calendar, a thesis calendar, etc… The thought was that this made it easy for me to color code my various activities so that I could easily tell what I should be doing at a glance. Inevitably though, a calendar or two would get their visibility turned off, and I would not notice, and I would double book myself somewhere.
It was not until I got angry about yet another double-booking of my time that I came to the understanding about how a calendar works. ONE calendar represents all the time I have. Having two calendars does not make me have twice as much time. If I can only be doing one thing at any given moment, then I only need ONE representation of my moments.
I now have ONE calendar. It is called “Gabe” and it represents my time.
So now you only have one calendar. What type of information goes on it? ->