JUST SAYING IT'S VERY INTERESTING THAT THE VAST MAJORITY OF RESPONSES TO THIS QUESTION ARE FROM PEOPLE WHO SIGNAL THEMSELVES AS WOMEN IN SOME WAY, JUST SAYING
I LOVE Google Calendar. I love it so much. I developed a whole course about becoming a more attentive friend and another about meal planning using Google Calendar, in fact (and stopped course development because while I love G:Cal, I do not love coaching).
Everything that needs to happen goes on my calendar; between G:Cal and ToDoIst, I keep myself on task and punctual, because I never know what time it is, what day it is, or what year. I'm not even sure I qualify with 'time blindness' so much as I have 'time? what even IS that?'
The TL;DR of how I've harnessed digital calendars like G:Cal to run my home and work responsibilities:
1. Meal planning has its own calendar ("Dinner") and my family and I assigned certain days of the week to a rotating schedule of meals (Tuesdays, for example, are tacos, then burgers and dogs, then breakfast, then burgers and dogs, etc) and I repeat meals that everyone likes on a 3- or 4- (or 6-) week schedule. So if everyone loves cashew chicken, I can schedule that for Mondays, repeating every four weeks, and everyone is very happy about that.
2. For being a better friend and correspondent, I put people's birthdays on my calendar, repeat annually, and then add notifications with enough time to either get and send a gift (3 weeks prior) or send a card (4 days prior). I also add things like anniversaries of people's deaths so I can send a card or note to let someone know I'm thinking of them on a sad day.
I've also helped people create calendars to track mental or physical health (color coding all day "appointments" with red/yellow/green) and for awhile I tracked my cycle using G:Cal. That calendar was called "SHARK WEEK."
Oh - another example: when classroom Valentines were my nemesis, I set an annual appointment on Feb 15: "Go to CVS, get lollipop or not-chocolate valentines for next year, put in X spot in closet." Then on Feb 12: "The valentines are in X spot in the closet."
Basically, past me and present me work together to help future me because all of me never knows what day it is.
I am in a calendar-obsessed industry, and myself am a very punctual person who has traditionally seen punctuality as a virtue. Time is all we have in this world; please don't waste mine.
BUT I took a seminar from a DEI agency on monochronic vs. polychronic cultures, and it sort of blew my mind. (It's a part of a larger education course from the group, and it's excellent, and I'm not affiliated with them besides being a happy client: https://whitenessatwork.com/ ). It made me realize how rigid my own punctuality (and valuation of punctuality) is—I am elevating the calendar beyond my human relationships. If someone is late to meet up with me, I see that as them not valuing my time, and therefore me. But someone who is chronically late because they get caught up in conversations with other people, or even just the moment they're in, are also likely to give that same devotion to *our* conversation and *our* time together.
I'm not sure what to do with this information, besides use it to think through my own reactions when someone is late, and to do my best at work to respect people's use of open time. The fact is, we are in a meetings-heavy time for "knowledge workers" (ugh), and I don't know how we work around that while respecting polychronic orientation, because we're busy. But that's what it comes down to, right? That we're TOO busy, and so our time becomes more valuable than our people.
My 12 year old didn't do his homework last night because he forgot his book at school, and my immediate question was, "where is your planner?!" Of course, the planner isn't the homework, but I just couldn't imagine a world in which a planner would not solve his problems. He's never used a planner before. His calendar has been the same since he started school, and since he was born: it's whatever the adults in his life tell him to do. He is skeptical of the entire planner/calendar situation. When I was trying to sell him on it, he said, "that sounds like extra work." Out of the mouths of babes! I keep both a Google Calendar and a written weekly planner. I have tried all the written planners. I have tried monthly, weekly, daily. I have Passion Planned. They are all imperfect. The boxes are too small or too big. I don't want to write down my life goals, thank you very much. But I do want to write down stupid personal affirmations like "get some rest, you nutball," which is what I wrote last week after a hard couple of days. Google Calendar doesn't really let you do that, but it's useful. During a couples therapy appointment when I lamented about how unreliable my husband was, the therapist said, "everyone needs to use the calendar." So apparently calendars save marriages. There are times when I just don't feel like talking to anyone, or putting in the effort, so I say "send me a Calendar invite!" or "it won't happen unless it's in my Calendar!" There are times when my Calendar pushes notifications on my phone and my watch, and it feels like I am being shocked into living my life the way that I said I would live it. Sometimes the calendar is a bully. I think my ideal calendar would be a reverse calendar. I'd want to see how much unscheduled time I have. I'd want to just show up somewhere--a friend's house, a nice meal, a scenic walk--and enjoy it for as long as I am able, unhurried.
I wish I could live in a world governed by the calendar that actually governs my life – the Jewish calendar. I'm forever having to reconcile it against the Gregorian calendar and explaining to people why the Jewish holidays "move around and are different every year". They're not! They're on the same date every single year! Rosh HaShanah is always on 1st Tishrei! Chanukah is always 25th Kislev! It's just that the Gregorian calendar is solar and the Jewish calendar is lunisolar, and they are not totally in accord with each other. I've synced Hebcal to my Google Calendar; it's important to me from a deassimilation/decolonization perspective to be aware of what the date actually is. Even though I'm not the most observant, I want to have this as a default part of my mindset, and if I don't make the effort, it's all too easy to lose it.
As far as the practical stuff goes, I have pretty much everything synced to GCal... one of my jobs posts shifts to When2Work, and I have that synced so it shows up automatically there. My other job is fully remote and our Zoom meetings are sent by Google invite so they're there automatically too. Same with my therapy appointments and similar. I have a colour-coding system for each event type (social is blue, Job 1 is yellow, Job 2 is purple, health-related is red, etc.).
I'd love to have a shared Google calendar with my spouse, but I've accepted he's never really going to manage to adopt that. Instead I printed out a paper one (one month per page) and we have that magneted to the fridge and write down mutually-relevant events on there. It works pretty well.
As an academic and another fan of digital shared calendars (GCal for our institution for the last ten years), I recognize the frustrations that prompted the Tweet AHP quotes. I am the faculty director of a unit that otherwise has non-faculty staff. We all operate with multiple joint calendars, and our non-detailed busy/free info is accessible to all at the university. Scheduling things with our staff and other non-faculty is easy and painless. Scheduling things with my faculty colleagues in my home unit is cumbersome and sometimes involves literally dozens of emails (I've counted). Our record is thirty-nine emails to schedule a meeting among seven people four weeks away. (Two people forgot to attend in the end, anyway.)
I obviously have a personal preference on what is a better system, but I raise this here to point to a equity problem: non-faculty staff are *expected* to use Google Calendar. Faculty, even non-tenure-stream faculty, can do what they want, and do. Some proudly wave their paper calendars as evidence of independent thinking. Good for them, I guess, but what they frequently don't realize is that they create extra work to already poorly paid non-faculty support staff. There's much to be said for academic freedom, but I feel the freedom to flaunt practices that, for better or for worse, become community expectations isn't fighting the man as much as free-riding on others' work.
I've been reading "Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals" by Oliver Burkeman and it's making me think differently about my lifelong relationship to calendars -- namely, that "This planner is going to be what solves my anxiety!" I love filling the calendar, coloring in a planner, making appointments and setting goals...but I dislike actually doing any of it, so instead I just keep planning further out, so I don't have to figure out what i'm doing RIGHT NOW, i can plan for the future forever, thinking that I'll still exist at any/every point. This is rambly, but I'm trying to shift toward thinking about where I am now, what I actually want in a day, and how to appropriately spend down my 4,000 (if I'm lucky) weeks. (And I promise it will not be bucket-listy with sky-diving and world travel -- it will probably be, oh yeah, I *DO* like reading and will do that rather than join another board.)
Anyway, looking forward to reading responses here, and grateful for the title recommendations you shared!
I keep my personal and work calendars totally separate - everything work-related lives in Outlook, and I only look at it between 8:30 am and 5:30 pm Monday through Friday.
I use both Google Calendar and a bullet journal for personal calendaring stuff. Google Calendar is mostly used as a continuous record of what appointments, plans, etc. are coming up, and what tasks I need reminding about, in a place where I can set reminders/alarms for myself - it’s also a way for all that to be visible to my husband, if he needs it. (He generally doesn’t - we normally just talk through scheduling stuff - but sometimes it’s handy.)
On Sunday of each week, I sit down with my bullet journal and write a list of 1) any actual scheduled things happening this week, 2) any tasks that need to get done this week (but aren’t tied to a particular date and time), and 3) the tasks that need to happen every week. That’s what I work off of as the week goes on - I think mostly because I find the feeling of checking something off of a paper list SO SATISFYING in a way I’ve never been able to replicate digitally.
I also acknowledge that, as a childless adult who’s married to a very independent guy, I have a lot less stuff to keep track of than other people.
I am dying to read answers re the last question. I am a sahm to four kids, and this is a holy nightmare. Our local school district only provides the calendar in pdf form, so parents have to input everything manually on their own calendars. I am trying to help my kids nursery school create a google calendar to track openings/closing instead of the pdf of the calendar they share but it is slow going.
it is also mind blowing to me how bad apps are for scheduling kids appts. (Specifically I’m talking about the major health care system I use for pediatric care that won’t allow me to schedule more than two kids for appts at a time without making phone calls to their scheduling line, and then the app still won’t recognize this schedule. )
I spent over 90 minutes last year scheduling flu shots for three of my kids to occur stacked on the same day, if you logged into the mychart portal, the appts appeared to be on two separate weeks. This year I resigned to making three separate appts for my four children rather than call, be on hold, talk to human, be on hold, make appts, look at app with weird info, call again, wait on hold, talk to human to confirm, be on hold, etc.)
I also cannot use the scheduler app for this system to schedule a Covid vaccine for my youngest child. I spent an hour this week trying to figure out where a health dept clinic is offering shots for his age anywhere within a hour radius of my house.
Similarly, two of my kids play soccer, and the sports organization has an app, but that app doesn’t track individual team schedules, so each players’ parents’ are dependent upon transferring info from one coach’s email to your calendar. (One of my child’s teams requested we use a different app to organize the team calendar, and that app also allows you to rsvp to games and practices and sign up for post game snacks so coaches know what to expect. In things that will surprise no one, that child is coached by moms.) so yes, I have two apps downloaded to keep track of kids soccer, and one app is functionally useless. No, I haven’t figured out how to sync the useful one to my google calendar, but also I am unwilling to take on that mental load at this time. Esp since my google calendar never syncs correctly with my husbands so I’m constantly doing in person calendar meetings with him to ensure our kids all end up where they need to be at the right time.
I’m one of those individuals who does not use a calendar. I used to use a physical calendar, but I’ve since set it to the side. It’s certainly not a perfect system. I am subject to forgetting important dates from time to time. However, my mental calendar has not failed me enough to move it into the physical or digital world! I’m an EMT who works 12 hour shifts a minimum or 3 days a week, but sometimes up to 5. Working long hours means my entire day is blocked off. The remaining hours are there for sleep and personal care. I think I’ve become defiant about keeping a calendar because it gives me a greater sense of control on my days off. It’s a way of reclaiming my power in my personal life. The power I’m forced to relinquish, or rather, shift into a different type of power, during my working hours. I don’t keep a calendar because I think it gives me the power to manipulate time in my favor. The sun still rises and sets, but I spend less time counting the minutes than when I did keep a calendar.
This is more abstract and big-picture than concrete and detailed, but: as a former academic turned priest, part of my personal goal is to re-orient my life from the shape of the academic calendar to the shape of the church calendar. How we inhabit time fundamentally shapes our affections (this is why political revolutions often try to overhaul/recreate calendars), and in our current moment, time gets flattened. We aren't dependent on the sun because of electricity. We can shop 24 hours. Etc. The longstanding church observation of a day of rest is a way to combat the power of capitalism in our lives. The rhythms of a sacred calendar can help us resist the domination of capitalism and can un-flatten time.
In the Episcopal church, our new year begins with Advent (Nov 27, this year), as we await the birth of Jesus. Every year we reprise the life of Jesus: Mary's pregnancy, Jesus' birth, his life, death, resurrection, and continued presence in the life of the church itself. And the more we live into that, the less, perhaps, we see time as a straight line moving forward into the future. Instead, it's like a spiral, spiraling deeper into ultimate truths revealed to us through the life of Jesus.
LOL I do know that you're asking about practical details of google calendar, etc., but I always like to look at the larger theoretical framework before I think about those details.
I'm in a strange interstitial space with regard to calendars. I like to think I'm deeply involved in the caregiving you mention, though not as deeply as my spouse, but I'm also one of the male engineers you mention. A shared calendar is absolutely essential for getting through my day without letting anyone down. My biggest challenge is that it's not possible to create one single place to be aware of all of my commitments to work and to family, as well as my spouse's commitments, my two increasingly busy children's, and a disabled family member's. And that's just the calendar! I have multiple to-do lists as well. And I have ADHD, so I have a deep-seated fear of missing something important because I didn't write it down, or wrote it down and forgot where I wrote it down, or wrote it down in the right place but forgot to check it.
So, despite all of this, the solution that has worked best for me is a bullet journal. (Do I get a door prize from Ryder Carroll for being the first in the thread to mention the bullet journal?) I can check in on the family calendar and work calendar for a given day, jot quick notes into the daily entry as needed, and look for conflicts. I also keep most of my personal to-dos there. When I start to try to embrace digital for everything, I can go for around a month before the creeping anxiety that I've overlooked something becomes too much to bear, and I return to analog planning.
All that said, if I could have a better digital solution that would eliminate the anxiety I feel, I'd prefer that. My handwriting stinks!
Thanks for this prompt. I have been in a complicated relationship with calendars for my entire working life (now about 15 years), and I guess I’m the first generation who has had google calendar since college... But I will say that for a long time, I resisted any kind of electronic calendar because it felt “yuppie” to me -- it was almost a gut reaction from my class anxieties. I didn’t want to become That Calendar Type because it felt like a giant step into a professional class that didn’t feel like my culture.
Then I began to realize how much executive functioning pressure it relieved for me -- and eventually with my job as an administrator at a school, a public “smart” calendar became indispensable given how many meetings other people had to schedule for me.
So, I remain in two minds. I love the convenience, which allows me to spend my time thinking and feeling about things other than planning. Yet I think the idea that my time exists visually, and electronically, still gives me the creeps.
I think a lot about the power dynamics embedded in both calendaring and the the busyness of one's calendar. In a culture that feels relentlessly focused on productivity (but that often confuses productivity with busyness), calendars sometimes do more harm than good. For example, I have no meetings on my schedule today and for a moment I thought, "Am I losing ground? Does this say something about my importance in my organization? In the world?" No, is the answer. But I did think about it - using energy and time that could have actually been spent doing something truly valuable to me.
I have a three year old who doesn’t think about time in the same way as me so we’ve adopted daily rhythms that don’t necessarily require a time frame in which they need to be done but still provide routine and flow to our lives.
I don't have enough time (ha ha) to comment at length right now, but I LOVE this topic and wanted to add/ask a few things.
-I find it very difficult to sync my personal Google calendar and my work-mandated Outlook calendar! Has anyone found a good solution to that?
-The promise of Zen-like efficiency peddled by so many systems, apps, etc. is alluring to the point of addiction, and the best of that I've seen is the Bullet Journal, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rKQQByxaBw
-Years ago there was a little exhibit on calendars through the decades in the basement of the National Museum of American History, and it was fascinating! I wonder if AHP could track down the curator.
JUST SAYING IT'S VERY INTERESTING THAT THE VAST MAJORITY OF RESPONSES TO THIS QUESTION ARE FROM PEOPLE WHO SIGNAL THEMSELVES AS WOMEN IN SOME WAY, JUST SAYING
I LOVE Google Calendar. I love it so much. I developed a whole course about becoming a more attentive friend and another about meal planning using Google Calendar, in fact (and stopped course development because while I love G:Cal, I do not love coaching).
Everything that needs to happen goes on my calendar; between G:Cal and ToDoIst, I keep myself on task and punctual, because I never know what time it is, what day it is, or what year. I'm not even sure I qualify with 'time blindness' so much as I have 'time? what even IS that?'
The TL;DR of how I've harnessed digital calendars like G:Cal to run my home and work responsibilities:
1. Meal planning has its own calendar ("Dinner") and my family and I assigned certain days of the week to a rotating schedule of meals (Tuesdays, for example, are tacos, then burgers and dogs, then breakfast, then burgers and dogs, etc) and I repeat meals that everyone likes on a 3- or 4- (or 6-) week schedule. So if everyone loves cashew chicken, I can schedule that for Mondays, repeating every four weeks, and everyone is very happy about that.
2. For being a better friend and correspondent, I put people's birthdays on my calendar, repeat annually, and then add notifications with enough time to either get and send a gift (3 weeks prior) or send a card (4 days prior). I also add things like anniversaries of people's deaths so I can send a card or note to let someone know I'm thinking of them on a sad day.
I've also helped people create calendars to track mental or physical health (color coding all day "appointments" with red/yellow/green) and for awhile I tracked my cycle using G:Cal. That calendar was called "SHARK WEEK."
Oh - another example: when classroom Valentines were my nemesis, I set an annual appointment on Feb 15: "Go to CVS, get lollipop or not-chocolate valentines for next year, put in X spot in closet." Then on Feb 12: "The valentines are in X spot in the closet."
Basically, past me and present me work together to help future me because all of me never knows what day it is.
I am in a calendar-obsessed industry, and myself am a very punctual person who has traditionally seen punctuality as a virtue. Time is all we have in this world; please don't waste mine.
BUT I took a seminar from a DEI agency on monochronic vs. polychronic cultures, and it sort of blew my mind. (It's a part of a larger education course from the group, and it's excellent, and I'm not affiliated with them besides being a happy client: https://whitenessatwork.com/ ). It made me realize how rigid my own punctuality (and valuation of punctuality) is—I am elevating the calendar beyond my human relationships. If someone is late to meet up with me, I see that as them not valuing my time, and therefore me. But someone who is chronically late because they get caught up in conversations with other people, or even just the moment they're in, are also likely to give that same devotion to *our* conversation and *our* time together.
I'm not sure what to do with this information, besides use it to think through my own reactions when someone is late, and to do my best at work to respect people's use of open time. The fact is, we are in a meetings-heavy time for "knowledge workers" (ugh), and I don't know how we work around that while respecting polychronic orientation, because we're busy. But that's what it comes down to, right? That we're TOO busy, and so our time becomes more valuable than our people.
My 12 year old didn't do his homework last night because he forgot his book at school, and my immediate question was, "where is your planner?!" Of course, the planner isn't the homework, but I just couldn't imagine a world in which a planner would not solve his problems. He's never used a planner before. His calendar has been the same since he started school, and since he was born: it's whatever the adults in his life tell him to do. He is skeptical of the entire planner/calendar situation. When I was trying to sell him on it, he said, "that sounds like extra work." Out of the mouths of babes! I keep both a Google Calendar and a written weekly planner. I have tried all the written planners. I have tried monthly, weekly, daily. I have Passion Planned. They are all imperfect. The boxes are too small or too big. I don't want to write down my life goals, thank you very much. But I do want to write down stupid personal affirmations like "get some rest, you nutball," which is what I wrote last week after a hard couple of days. Google Calendar doesn't really let you do that, but it's useful. During a couples therapy appointment when I lamented about how unreliable my husband was, the therapist said, "everyone needs to use the calendar." So apparently calendars save marriages. There are times when I just don't feel like talking to anyone, or putting in the effort, so I say "send me a Calendar invite!" or "it won't happen unless it's in my Calendar!" There are times when my Calendar pushes notifications on my phone and my watch, and it feels like I am being shocked into living my life the way that I said I would live it. Sometimes the calendar is a bully. I think my ideal calendar would be a reverse calendar. I'd want to see how much unscheduled time I have. I'd want to just show up somewhere--a friend's house, a nice meal, a scenic walk--and enjoy it for as long as I am able, unhurried.
I wish I could live in a world governed by the calendar that actually governs my life – the Jewish calendar. I'm forever having to reconcile it against the Gregorian calendar and explaining to people why the Jewish holidays "move around and are different every year". They're not! They're on the same date every single year! Rosh HaShanah is always on 1st Tishrei! Chanukah is always 25th Kislev! It's just that the Gregorian calendar is solar and the Jewish calendar is lunisolar, and they are not totally in accord with each other. I've synced Hebcal to my Google Calendar; it's important to me from a deassimilation/decolonization perspective to be aware of what the date actually is. Even though I'm not the most observant, I want to have this as a default part of my mindset, and if I don't make the effort, it's all too easy to lose it.
As far as the practical stuff goes, I have pretty much everything synced to GCal... one of my jobs posts shifts to When2Work, and I have that synced so it shows up automatically there. My other job is fully remote and our Zoom meetings are sent by Google invite so they're there automatically too. Same with my therapy appointments and similar. I have a colour-coding system for each event type (social is blue, Job 1 is yellow, Job 2 is purple, health-related is red, etc.).
I'd love to have a shared Google calendar with my spouse, but I've accepted he's never really going to manage to adopt that. Instead I printed out a paper one (one month per page) and we have that magneted to the fridge and write down mutually-relevant events on there. It works pretty well.
As an academic and another fan of digital shared calendars (GCal for our institution for the last ten years), I recognize the frustrations that prompted the Tweet AHP quotes. I am the faculty director of a unit that otherwise has non-faculty staff. We all operate with multiple joint calendars, and our non-detailed busy/free info is accessible to all at the university. Scheduling things with our staff and other non-faculty is easy and painless. Scheduling things with my faculty colleagues in my home unit is cumbersome and sometimes involves literally dozens of emails (I've counted). Our record is thirty-nine emails to schedule a meeting among seven people four weeks away. (Two people forgot to attend in the end, anyway.)
I obviously have a personal preference on what is a better system, but I raise this here to point to a equity problem: non-faculty staff are *expected* to use Google Calendar. Faculty, even non-tenure-stream faculty, can do what they want, and do. Some proudly wave their paper calendars as evidence of independent thinking. Good for them, I guess, but what they frequently don't realize is that they create extra work to already poorly paid non-faculty support staff. There's much to be said for academic freedom, but I feel the freedom to flaunt practices that, for better or for worse, become community expectations isn't fighting the man as much as free-riding on others' work.
I've been reading "Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals" by Oliver Burkeman and it's making me think differently about my lifelong relationship to calendars -- namely, that "This planner is going to be what solves my anxiety!" I love filling the calendar, coloring in a planner, making appointments and setting goals...but I dislike actually doing any of it, so instead I just keep planning further out, so I don't have to figure out what i'm doing RIGHT NOW, i can plan for the future forever, thinking that I'll still exist at any/every point. This is rambly, but I'm trying to shift toward thinking about where I am now, what I actually want in a day, and how to appropriately spend down my 4,000 (if I'm lucky) weeks. (And I promise it will not be bucket-listy with sky-diving and world travel -- it will probably be, oh yeah, I *DO* like reading and will do that rather than join another board.)
Anyway, looking forward to reading responses here, and grateful for the title recommendations you shared!
I keep my personal and work calendars totally separate - everything work-related lives in Outlook, and I only look at it between 8:30 am and 5:30 pm Monday through Friday.
I use both Google Calendar and a bullet journal for personal calendaring stuff. Google Calendar is mostly used as a continuous record of what appointments, plans, etc. are coming up, and what tasks I need reminding about, in a place where I can set reminders/alarms for myself - it’s also a way for all that to be visible to my husband, if he needs it. (He generally doesn’t - we normally just talk through scheduling stuff - but sometimes it’s handy.)
On Sunday of each week, I sit down with my bullet journal and write a list of 1) any actual scheduled things happening this week, 2) any tasks that need to get done this week (but aren’t tied to a particular date and time), and 3) the tasks that need to happen every week. That’s what I work off of as the week goes on - I think mostly because I find the feeling of checking something off of a paper list SO SATISFYING in a way I’ve never been able to replicate digitally.
I also acknowledge that, as a childless adult who’s married to a very independent guy, I have a lot less stuff to keep track of than other people.
I am dying to read answers re the last question. I am a sahm to four kids, and this is a holy nightmare. Our local school district only provides the calendar in pdf form, so parents have to input everything manually on their own calendars. I am trying to help my kids nursery school create a google calendar to track openings/closing instead of the pdf of the calendar they share but it is slow going.
it is also mind blowing to me how bad apps are for scheduling kids appts. (Specifically I’m talking about the major health care system I use for pediatric care that won’t allow me to schedule more than two kids for appts at a time without making phone calls to their scheduling line, and then the app still won’t recognize this schedule. )
I spent over 90 minutes last year scheduling flu shots for three of my kids to occur stacked on the same day, if you logged into the mychart portal, the appts appeared to be on two separate weeks. This year I resigned to making three separate appts for my four children rather than call, be on hold, talk to human, be on hold, make appts, look at app with weird info, call again, wait on hold, talk to human to confirm, be on hold, etc.)
I also cannot use the scheduler app for this system to schedule a Covid vaccine for my youngest child. I spent an hour this week trying to figure out where a health dept clinic is offering shots for his age anywhere within a hour radius of my house.
Similarly, two of my kids play soccer, and the sports organization has an app, but that app doesn’t track individual team schedules, so each players’ parents’ are dependent upon transferring info from one coach’s email to your calendar. (One of my child’s teams requested we use a different app to organize the team calendar, and that app also allows you to rsvp to games and practices and sign up for post game snacks so coaches know what to expect. In things that will surprise no one, that child is coached by moms.) so yes, I have two apps downloaded to keep track of kids soccer, and one app is functionally useless. No, I haven’t figured out how to sync the useful one to my google calendar, but also I am unwilling to take on that mental load at this time. Esp since my google calendar never syncs correctly with my husbands so I’m constantly doing in person calendar meetings with him to ensure our kids all end up where they need to be at the right time.
I’m one of those individuals who does not use a calendar. I used to use a physical calendar, but I’ve since set it to the side. It’s certainly not a perfect system. I am subject to forgetting important dates from time to time. However, my mental calendar has not failed me enough to move it into the physical or digital world! I’m an EMT who works 12 hour shifts a minimum or 3 days a week, but sometimes up to 5. Working long hours means my entire day is blocked off. The remaining hours are there for sleep and personal care. I think I’ve become defiant about keeping a calendar because it gives me a greater sense of control on my days off. It’s a way of reclaiming my power in my personal life. The power I’m forced to relinquish, or rather, shift into a different type of power, during my working hours. I don’t keep a calendar because I think it gives me the power to manipulate time in my favor. The sun still rises and sets, but I spend less time counting the minutes than when I did keep a calendar.
This is more abstract and big-picture than concrete and detailed, but: as a former academic turned priest, part of my personal goal is to re-orient my life from the shape of the academic calendar to the shape of the church calendar. How we inhabit time fundamentally shapes our affections (this is why political revolutions often try to overhaul/recreate calendars), and in our current moment, time gets flattened. We aren't dependent on the sun because of electricity. We can shop 24 hours. Etc. The longstanding church observation of a day of rest is a way to combat the power of capitalism in our lives. The rhythms of a sacred calendar can help us resist the domination of capitalism and can un-flatten time.
In the Episcopal church, our new year begins with Advent (Nov 27, this year), as we await the birth of Jesus. Every year we reprise the life of Jesus: Mary's pregnancy, Jesus' birth, his life, death, resurrection, and continued presence in the life of the church itself. And the more we live into that, the less, perhaps, we see time as a straight line moving forward into the future. Instead, it's like a spiral, spiraling deeper into ultimate truths revealed to us through the life of Jesus.
LOL I do know that you're asking about practical details of google calendar, etc., but I always like to look at the larger theoretical framework before I think about those details.
I'm in a strange interstitial space with regard to calendars. I like to think I'm deeply involved in the caregiving you mention, though not as deeply as my spouse, but I'm also one of the male engineers you mention. A shared calendar is absolutely essential for getting through my day without letting anyone down. My biggest challenge is that it's not possible to create one single place to be aware of all of my commitments to work and to family, as well as my spouse's commitments, my two increasingly busy children's, and a disabled family member's. And that's just the calendar! I have multiple to-do lists as well. And I have ADHD, so I have a deep-seated fear of missing something important because I didn't write it down, or wrote it down and forgot where I wrote it down, or wrote it down in the right place but forgot to check it.
So, despite all of this, the solution that has worked best for me is a bullet journal. (Do I get a door prize from Ryder Carroll for being the first in the thread to mention the bullet journal?) I can check in on the family calendar and work calendar for a given day, jot quick notes into the daily entry as needed, and look for conflicts. I also keep most of my personal to-dos there. When I start to try to embrace digital for everything, I can go for around a month before the creeping anxiety that I've overlooked something becomes too much to bear, and I return to analog planning.
All that said, if I could have a better digital solution that would eliminate the anxiety I feel, I'd prefer that. My handwriting stinks!
Thanks for this prompt. I have been in a complicated relationship with calendars for my entire working life (now about 15 years), and I guess I’m the first generation who has had google calendar since college... But I will say that for a long time, I resisted any kind of electronic calendar because it felt “yuppie” to me -- it was almost a gut reaction from my class anxieties. I didn’t want to become That Calendar Type because it felt like a giant step into a professional class that didn’t feel like my culture.
Then I began to realize how much executive functioning pressure it relieved for me -- and eventually with my job as an administrator at a school, a public “smart” calendar became indispensable given how many meetings other people had to schedule for me.
So, I remain in two minds. I love the convenience, which allows me to spend my time thinking and feeling about things other than planning. Yet I think the idea that my time exists visually, and electronically, still gives me the creeps.
I think a lot about the power dynamics embedded in both calendaring and the the busyness of one's calendar. In a culture that feels relentlessly focused on productivity (but that often confuses productivity with busyness), calendars sometimes do more harm than good. For example, I have no meetings on my schedule today and for a moment I thought, "Am I losing ground? Does this say something about my importance in my organization? In the world?" No, is the answer. But I did think about it - using energy and time that could have actually been spent doing something truly valuable to me.
I have a three year old who doesn’t think about time in the same way as me so we’ve adopted daily rhythms that don’t necessarily require a time frame in which they need to be done but still provide routine and flow to our lives.
On that note, I think much more about micro/seasons, time and alternate calendars since having kids. Here is a link that I’ve found insightful: https://rosszurowski.com/log/2018/small-seasons-long-calendars
I don't have enough time (ha ha) to comment at length right now, but I LOVE this topic and wanted to add/ask a few things.
-I find it very difficult to sync my personal Google calendar and my work-mandated Outlook calendar! Has anyone found a good solution to that?
-The promise of Zen-like efficiency peddled by so many systems, apps, etc. is alluring to the point of addiction, and the best of that I've seen is the Bullet Journal, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rKQQByxaBw
-Years ago there was a little exhibit on calendars through the decades in the basement of the National Museum of American History, and it was fascinating! I wonder if AHP could track down the curator.