Thinking Through the Calendar

"The sun makes days, seasons, and years, and the moon makes months, but people invented weeks."

I am currently deep in the reading trenches on the general subject of the calendar: its purposes, its disciplining function, its ongoing transition from analog to digital, from personal to “shared.” Part of this interest was sparked by the above tweet, which went viral in my corner of Twitter last week, but also by the scheduling needs of various projects in my life, and the thought, for the first time in my working life, that it might be time for me to keep an “up-to-date” public calendar.

I could riff on that idea for at least 2000 words and make it into a newsletter, but the better, smarter version of that newsletter requires immersing myself in some deeper reading: the absolute powerhouse of an academic article that is Judy Wajcman’s “How Silicon Valley Sets Time,” revisiting Melissa Gregg’s ridiculously good Counterproductive: Time Management in the Knowledge Economy, spending time with Jill Lepore’s work on the formation of the “week” as a discrete mode of time measurement (also the source for the quote that serves as the sub-title for this piece), and sifting through emerging research on measurable outcomes between analog and digital calendar users. Plus, you know, reading about the Great Calendly Link Debate and trying out calendar “solving” services like Reclaim.ai.

Why all this focus on calendars? As Wajcman argues, they are “part of the infrastructure or scaffolding that configures arrangements among people and things.” They mediate our relationship with time, in and outside of paid labor or the workplace. And to better understand the tensions at the heart of this mediation, particularly in this particular moment, I want to hear about your calendar use (or total lack thereof). I’ve put some prompts below to get you started, but feel free to take all of this in another direction entirely, too.

Usually, I keep commenting exclusive to paid subscribers because it makes it so I don’t have to allocate significant, emotionally taxing time to moderation. Today, I’m going to experiment with opening this conversation up to all readers. Our rules here are straightforward: don’t be assholes, don’t be bigoted, don’t treat this space like it’s Twitter, behave like you’re responding to a real person because you are, and do everything in good faith. Failure to abide by those standards gets you permanently banned. Again: don’t be assholes about calendars and time allocation and let’s keep this one of the good places on the internet. I’ll be in the comments all day asking follow-up questions, so check back if you get a notification.

And free subscribers, this is an expanded example of the sorts of conversations we have in the Friday Thread every week — conversations readers love to participate and lurk in. If you’re interesting in having them in your inbox once a week, consider pulling the trigger and becoming a paid subscriber.

If you’re a paid subscriber, thank you for being patient with (and participating in) the process of writing a substantive piece — you truly make this work possible, and I, as ever, so incredibly grateful for you.

And now, some potential starting points as you think through your own relationship with calendars:

• If you use a digital calendar/multiple digital calendars: How have they come to shape the rhythms of your day and the way you think of time? Both “occupied” (within the calendar) and (at least officially) “unoccupied”? What have digital calendars specifically facilitated, and what have they made more complex than it should be?

• If your calendar is public or shared in any way — how does it communicate who you are as a person and laborer? How does your busy-ness (or others’ business) correlate with the understanding of what type of worker you are, and your relationship to work?

• If you use a physical planner (or use a physical planner in addition to a digital one): how does it work differently than a digital calendar? What is lost and what is gained in being the only person (or one of the only people) with final access to your time?

• If you don’t use a calendar in any way: why? What is lost, and what is gained?

• If you’re in an industry that is obsessive about calendars: what does that reflect about the way your industry conceives of time? If you’re in an industry that’s resistant to digital calendars (see: academia, although the friction/difference in attitudes is telling) what do you think is going on there?

• What’s the hardest part about maintaining an “up-to-date” calendar? What sort of time uses are resistant to calendar/scheduling form?

• Most digital calendars were made by younger male engineers without caregiving responsibilities — and the needs of their lives are reflected in the way the calendar itself is organized and what tools have been created to emphasis their priorities, primarily as workers. What would a calendar built by you/for you and your needs communicate?