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 REALLY wish the responsiblity for tracking things for work and the family didn't somehow land on me managing the systems so as to avoid managing a crisis - AND YET.
My partner participates actively in household labor and we have a relatively equitable division, but setting up systems to keep things running is on me. I've made clear that this counts as labor and that I'll do it while he cleans the bathroom, at least, which is a partial win.
Right same. I also have a partner who is good at household labor and staying ahead of daily tasks and childcare, but managing our calendar, social schedule and putting systems in place is part of my deal. Without google calendar, it would be so much harder.
My partner also struggles with priorities—if it’s in front of him, he wants to do it right then. It’s great for things like dishes and picking up things, but terrible when we have several competing priorities and are on a schedule. We don’t have time to suddenly dust the ceiling fan bc we need to pack up the baby and put away the dishes before we leave for something, for example.
OMG SAME! Like I appreciate you want to handle a task you see without being asked, but also the baby needs fed and there are dishes to be put away.
He also is really bad at losing his keys and I keep telling him he needs to leave them in one place all the time. That’s what I do! It took him years to finally decide to do it
We just moved house and one of the first things my husband did was set up a place for our keys to live on a bookshelf… so of course I put my keys there when I come home.
EVERY SINGLE DAY he asks me where the keys are and every single day I have to tell him they are in the bowl on the bookshelf where HE decided they would live
My spouse, frustrated with my key-losing, finally bought us Tile. It has made a huge difference. The few times I forget to hang them up, I just click the app.
Same - but my husband won't even use his Google calendar even when I "invite" him to events. So I keep up my home and work calendars on my phone, but if I don't keep up the hand-written wall calendar at home, my husband and daughter don't know what's going on. Drives me bonkers that it's always me, but if I don't do it, no one will. I agree though on the division of labor -- he does other things that I don't do...
I struggle that my husband (it feels almost insincere in this thread to say partner) will see and agree to what’s on the calendar when we add it, but weeks later, act surprised or exasperated because “he didn’t realize that was today,” or “that never made it to his work calendar.” Sometimes it’s a hard same, (my biggest non-relationship struggle is that my company gate keeps our work calendars so almost daily I have to reconcile them both), but the difference is I then need to take on the work of RESCHEDULING or fielding this thing or parts of this thing myself.
Yeah, same. I keep trying to explain how the arranging of everything and organizing and scheduling is an entire job unto itself, but it's been almost 25 years and I haven't gotten far. I wish it weren't so exhausting, but more than that I wish everyone were raised to understand what goes into all of this work!
Yes. This is why I created what I call my "Emotional Labor/Mental Load" Google Workbook and named myself as the CEO/Family Project Manager because once I put it into white-collared terms and systems my husband FINALLY started understanding how much work I do. A previous therapist suggested I do this and I brushed off her suggestion for years because it was once again assigning me more work, but it allows me to remove a lot of anxiety from my brain and onto a Google Sheet that I can minimize in daily life.
The most critical parts of this workbook are the budget sheets and the chore sheets. Once I started tracking literally every dollar we both understood where our money was going. Once I broke down household chores into 110 tasks he understood that "doing laundry" wasn't just one line item but several - "Make sure all dirty clothing and towels are in hampers: inside out if unsoiled, right side out if soiled," "carry clothes downstairs and check lint filters as needed," "Use Spray and Wash on stains", "Hand wash laundry when needed," "Wash laundry in washer (adjust temperature and load size/type first!)," "Hang dry delicate laundry on rack," "Dry rest of laundry in dryer (adjust temperature and load size/type first!)," "Carry dry and clean laundry upstairs in basket(s)," "Fold and put away Laundry".
I think a lot of people would say that I broke it down too much, but as someone with chronic health issues, I need every step to be clear because steps like carrying laundry up and down multiple flights of stairs and folding and putting away laundry can be physically intensive for me.
It's amazing how well the workbook has helped me, if for no other reason than pointing out how little I ask of my husband and how much I do every single day. Suddenly, he feels pretty stupid that he didn't put a new trash bag in the trash can as part of the one chore he was responsible for while I spent my entire evening doing a well-documented list of chores.
Hopefully you'll all get a notification with this reply. I go into more detail in a comment on Anne's latest post ("The Diminishing Returns of Calendar Culture") but in brief: I'm still working on it and will share it as soon as I can!
My spouse, who is a couples/family therapist, built a survey for couples to look at this. But whoa- I love the idea of an ongoing sheet, and my spouse would probably appreciate being able to share something as well.
This is kind of an amazing idea! I'd be interested to try it in my own life. I was trying to explain some of it to my teen son yesterday and got tangled up in my own overwhelm.
Yep. My husband doesn't keep a personal calendar and never looks at my Google personal/family calendar. He also doesn't look at my "Emotional Labor/Mental Load" workbook on Google Sheets, either, which includes our master budget, payment schedule, day-by-day breakdown of everything we spend money on, birthday and holiday cards/gifts, doctors and medications, 110 regular chores sorted by room and frequency, diary of chores completed, packing lists for various scenarios, and lists of various routines. I resented creating all of these lists and calendars for family project management until I realized that doing so would allow me to let go of so much stress in my brain (and it really has lowered my anxiety!) Now that I consider myself to be CEO/Family Project Manager, weirdly enough my relationship with my husband has improved because HE FINALLY UNDERSTANDS how much work I do. So when he complains when I instruct him to finish one measly chore I can point to the five I did.
Aww thank you! Because I have a lot of personal information in there, I don't feel comfortable sharing the original, but what I'll do is create a sharable template version of it when I have some free time this weekend and let you know when it's finished!
Add me to the list!! I feel overwhelmed by creating these kinds of things. And somehow keep berating myself for not being more organized and on top of all the fucking things. Thank you!
Hopefully you'll all get a notification with this reply. I go into more detail in a comment on Anne's latest post ("The Diminishing Returns of Calendar Culture") but in brief: I'm still working on it and will share it as soon as I can!
Finally getting into this *because working/studying full time while also parenting 3 kids* and YES to everything you shared. I was less proactive and more reactive in addressing the division of labor in our home, but this is exactly the core issue. I would love the google doc because mine is a list on a shared Note.
Coincidence or not, my sister and I were talking about the emotional/mental labor of running a household last night and how it lands so heavily on certain genders, especially in heterosexual relationships. I sent her that French comic by Emma on "You should have asked" and the mental load of making a household function and taking care of kids and all that. I think about it a lot.
I stopped doing any of his "stuff". I only washed my clothes. There was food in the fridge. I ate dinner when we planned, if he didn't like it, oh well. He stepped up for a while and then complained that none of his other friend's partners did the same. He did nothing and bitched constantly. I told him to find someone else and left. I thank God that we never had children.
I will only have relationships with men that step up. If I don't have a relationship, so be it. I have found a few but most want a Mom to take care of everything. I am not that person.
The complaints comparing partners--that's absurd. He can't have known what was actually going on in their lives, so using it as a standard for you to uphold was not only unfair, but, well, just as asshole thing to do.
I had a friend who was in a situation where she was constantly getting gaslit by her partner, had high standards of cleaning, had her do all the housework, and I finally had to step away from the friendship as she never realized that the problems stemmed from being matriarchal, not an equal. She even said that they couldn't have kids together because he was enough of a child for her. I think the guy was nice, he just was looking for a mom.
I also need to note that, as the person in my relationship with the attention deficit issues, I am the opposite end of this. My husband carries the OVERWHELMING share of the mental load in our home. Admitting this, in a room full of (female) colleagues talking about the frustration of the weight can be a really tough thing. I acknowledge that it is, hugely, women who carry this load, but neuroatypicality can flip the script on this one.
Isn't it? I am kind of in awe about how well the comic creator captured a dynamic that's actually very difficult to describe precisely because of the invisibility noted.
Others are noting how, of course, in heterosexual relationships the burden of calendar management is disproportionally one more thing that's piled onto the category of unseen/undervalued "women's work"... as I reflect on my own last fifteen years, while I now am the more flex/primary caregiver/household maintainer parent, not long ago I was in one of those (still disproportionally male) executive roles where there is somebody else (almost always a woman, still) who "manages your calendar" and so of course this is one more of those situations (like all caregiving professions) where the "women's work" assumption is permeable between both the domestic and professional sphere and how I 100% wouldn't have thought about that if my wife and I both still worked out of the home.
Yep, yep, yep. My husband has never had to manage a calendar at work because when he was a lower-level employee his tasks were assigned to him (by his boss's secretary) and now that he's established he has his own secretary to manage his calendar.
One of the most challenging parts of my teenage years in relation to my parents was that my dad changed jobs and started a business where his office was in the house. He’d always had a secretary and he was terrible at things like filing. Filing became part of my “chores” (I think maybe he wrote off my allowance that way?). If I left it to do too long, or he couldn’t find things he just couldn’t handle it; he was holding me to the standard of the adult women whose job it had been before, To this day, I loathe filing and try never to do it.
My dad ensured that I would hate all future office jobs by having me cover for his secretary when she went on holiday. Absolutely loathed the role.
Gradually I tried a few more office jobs, and but myself well enough to not ever try to run someone else's schedule/be an office mom. It has somewhat limited my career path, but I'm okay with it.
we have a pair of friends, and their kids, who actually say "if it's not on the calendar, it's not real". One partner has hard-core trained her family to PUT IT ON THE CALENDAR.
Yes, this! I am the main scheduler in my family and the amount of time it takes to make calendaring work for me (I need google for home + outlook for work + written planner for my brain) + then jiggering it to work for my spouse is enough to make flames come out of my ears. I subscribe to the "he's an adult, he can make his own fucking sandwich" (see above) model of living, but if I want him to show up/don't want to have a disagreement about it for the 10,000th time, well, 🤷🏻♀️
As the main care-person of our home and a full time employee of a company, I use a digital calendar to offload both the bullshit and important things into one space because my heart and brain simply aren’t that big.
“Follow-up on X’s mammogram results” (care, important) sits next to “All Hands Onsite Meeting” (bullshit, also…important?), which is a little gross.
Also, my teenager refuses to use Google Calendar (outright ignores my invites) bc he says can hold it all in his head. And he’s right…for now.
LOL the point of the calendar is that he doesn’t have to hold it all in his head—the calendar does. This sounds like some early efforts to offload this work on a woman
Oh I KNOW. And not in a “haha, boys… so funny way, what can you do???” way. You better believe this is an ongoing discussion with him about gendered and invisible labor. Thank you for calling that out, you are 100% correct.
I’m a little extra sensitive to these things because 1. My parents heavily buy into gender roles despite routinely not following themselves and 2. My MIL (a SAHP) raised 3 boys and, in some ways, she did a really good job because they are good at pitching in without being asked, cleaning up after themselves, etc. But in other ways, they are clearly used to someone taking care of things for them as evidenced by the fact that all three of them still call mom for input on fairly routine decisions. Luckily, my MIL is great and doesn’t butt in or anything, but it’s a difference I’ve definitely noticed
I've been the calendar manager in almost two decades of marriage, but something interesting happened when I moved across the country for a visiting gig for two years. During the first year, my husband accidentally double-booked a visit from an out of town friend the same weekend he had tickets to fly to see me. It was the inciting incident for us to shift to a hard copy family calendar hanging on the kitchen wall that we both put notes on and consult. (I have a work Google calendar with some notes overlap.) It has worked very well, even after having a kid, although the kid is only 2 and I know things will just get more complicated.
I will be sending this to my spouse, who is the person in our house who carries the mental load/does the bulk of the scheduling/keeps the calendar functioning. He has the unenviable task of trying to keep an ADD spouse ( and 2 pretty-much adult kids, also with ADD, when they're around) on the same scheduling page.
I will formally and freely admit that I suck at time management, but not in the sense of necessarily actual poor management, but mostly because I am natural night owl and people demand rigid adherence to their time scripts even in the age of artificial lighting and urban living. (Buddy, shut up about the damn cows, you ain't milking Bessy tomorrow morning. Aside from that the fact, that the vampire jokes have been made many times over the last 35-40 years so howabout you maybe try and come up with something original since I hate all fucking vampires, except Blade.)
On the other hand, I am pretty good at managing a household if allowed to do so (especially when there were the very modern blessings of 24-hour grocery stores).
So: 1) I notice that people, in the era of diversifying sexual orientations actual (or avowed) practical feminism and the like, cling ever more intensely to rigid gender roles, very much including women (even when they are complaining about them). I first encountered that when I was 17 and cooking something and an old lady came in to gawk at me cooking, ask me if I was gay (she was displeased when I said no, since obviously...), and then insisted she never heard of no man cooking. Then I was caught by surprise; these days, I would say something like, 'Have you ever considered fucking off, lady?'
2) I frequently observed the case when a woman in question is 'doing the housework' and then finishes, proceeds to drag out the wooden cross and three long nails. The problem of course, is that if you do those chores for them, they then get angry about it: you've deprived of something to complain about.
3) On the other, I have certainly noticed that people who do the housework (i.e. me, a not-female person) get dunked on for doing the housework. The problem is gender-identified but not about gender per se: cleaning the toilet is low-status work. (See all those dudes who don't clean the toilet when they're single.)
4) On the history of the rigid imposition of time standards, there is nothing better than this episode of Connections by James Burke: https://archive.org/details/james-burke-connections_s01e05 (It was made in 1978, so it totally has 70's hair and giant computers and punch cards and also just about everything everyone complains about with computers and modern life is right there.)
Yes, the tick tock of keeping up with demands was imposed for good reasons and also a number of bad ones.
elm
does the toilet paper goes over the top or underneath the dispenser?
Can I also add that so many women have set themselves reminders to buy and send birthday cards. Does anyone know of any men under the age of 70 who buy and send birthday cards? I don’t know any. I don’t even get cards from friends. Ia this a regional/cultural thing?
It HAS to be, because no one I know does it. We keep a birthday calendar of birthdays of people who we need to get presents for - maybe 10 people total? Including my mom and my nieces? But also my husband gets the presents for his side of the family so that's a shared calendar.
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.
Meredith, me too. Direct quote to my best friend this morning: "it's unbelievable how much I rely on the LG." (Actually, I said 'sad' instead of unbelievable, but I didn't mean sad at all, I meant... unbelievable.)
i would also check out the popcast with knox and jamie (@thepopcast on insta) they're friends with kendra irl and kendra thinks of erin their coo/producer as her muse!
Yes! But also I still feel bad about myself because I’m still more overwhelmed/anxiety ridden to consider myself either fully lazy or a genius, more a deer caught in headlights 80% of the time.
My meal planning calendar is just a bunch of dinner "events" that I shuffle forward in time and organize into a menu for the week. It's so easy. Google Calendar is so powerful when harnessed for good.
You're so right. And I find that at 4pm when it's time to think about dinner, I don't have the brain energy to decide what to make and hunt down the ingredients. If I look back at past menus, or I have pre-populated suggestions I can move around, coming up with a meal plan (and a grocery list) is a lot easier. I do So Much with G:Cal to avoid decision fatigue.
I'm so thrilled to find others who use Google calendar for meal planning!
I have tried to introduce others to the wonders of a meal planning sub-calendar and have been met with skepticism and responses like I'm really odd.
Personally it's life saving, I set stuff to repeat. I started with dinners that went over well (say spaghetti) and thought "I should make this again!" But then I weighed how often the family could tolerate it being served and how often I could tolerate fixing it. So I 'd set an initial interval of 6-week repeat, say. Maybe tweak it after a few repeats, longer or shorter. Build from there.
Currently I have a bunch of theme nights (bean & rice, tacos, soup, pasta, etc) that I do on a 13 week repeat during the school year, which is to say 13week intervals X3. So we only have cuban black beans with brown rice 3x during the school year, everyone is happy when it comes back around.
Summers have such a variation in schedules and available produce that I break with the school year menus and haven't quite gotten much of rhythm going
I will note that my daughter was diagnosed with Celiac when she was 5 (as well as a dairy allergy), so we eat at home way more than others, and 14 years ago there was way way way less GF "convenience" foods nor could we easily eat out, so it was vital that I got organized for meal planning
I love it! I manage a weekly meal calendar pretty well, but I’m not disciplined enough for this wonderfully efficient approach. And I have a family that “likes spontaneity.” So we eat a lot of eggs. Ha!
Eggs are breakfast/lunch, my 16yo son is an ovovore when scrounging his own meals.
Also I have "cancelled" whatever planned dinner was on the calendar if there's too much leftovers in the fridge. This hasn't happened as much in the teen years, especially with the 16yo having reached 6'6". Leftovers are now sacred for packed lunches.
And I will totally bail on the calendar plan if I am just not feeling the planned meal. Say the weather doesn't match, it's cold and rainy and everyone has a head cold, let's do chicken noodle soup. Or it's an unseasonably warm day in April, let's grill something and eat outside. But the schedule has my back when I don't want to think/decide.
Hello! I use Google Calendar for meal planning too. One thing I find useful is using the function where you can import from a spreadsheet, so we have a big list of meals we all enjoy as a family and create a spreadsheet for a whole month if we find the mental energy - we sometimes create a basic plan for one week and copy that across the month, then change it ad-hoc when we fancy a change. Sounds a bit boring I guess but Friday is always pizza night, Monday is always spaghetti, why fight it ;) - I guess that's like what you were saying about decision fatigue. Having said all this, in practice over the last couple of months we've been quite busy and life has been chaotic, and we've ended up planning only a week or two in advance.
Generally once we have the meal plan sorted, my wife and I share putting the weekly online order together - I are sure we have all the evening meal stuff, and she gets the breakfast/lunch bits. Then we have a shared list on Todoist for stuff like washing powder and toilet paper that we add to through the week and between us we make sure all that is added before the order is finalised.
Ah, Matt, you and your wife are our kind of people! I'm totally entranced by the concept of importing the spreadsheet data, and will be figuring out how to do this soon.
Thank you! I really wanted to be a better correspondent, and I LOVE when I get birthday cards from faraway friends, so I wanted to do the same for the people I like. :) The calendar event for someone's birthday can also serve as a log of what I've sent in past years, and if I see something that I know would be perfect, I can either order it and leave a note on my calendar where it is, or I can leave a link in the calendar description field, and use that when it's time.
SAVED. MY. BACON so many times. The key is to buy Valentine's (if candy is allowed in the first place) that aren't chocolate. So sour candy, lollipops were one of my favorites. And on Feb 15 they're all 50-75% off.
I'm already doing some of this (birthday and deathday reminders), but wow, these are absolutely genius ideas. Love the Valentine one. Thank you for the idea!!
I feel all of this in my BONES. Though, I should also add that my partner participates equally for the things that he notices. Our family agrees that "if it isn't on the calendar, it does not exist!"
Wait, what's this course and where can we find it? I think I'm like... 2/3 of the way in to what you're doing there and it needs refining, I want to pick your brain.
Also, if it helps anyone else: I have shared calendars with my husband for family stuff (we each see where the other is supposed to be), and each kid has a calendar (they're too young to manage their own, my oldest is 8). Both parents see all calendars, and they're all color-coordinated.
This means that I can look at the week's calendar and be like 'Middle Kid has pizza day Wednesday, and Oldest Kid has a dentist appointment which Parent 1 is driving her to on Friday, and Youngest Kid has an emergency apt at that time so it's gotta be Parent 2' in a glance via color-coding, as opposed to trying to figure out which calendar line is for who - because they're still at the age where THEIR appointments rely on and impact our schedules. It seems complex but it DOES work.
Specifically, I'm currently looking for tips on shared task management via google calendar - google does tasks, but not recurring shared tasks that I can find, and that's the current block on my household. We combine it with any.do but that's been bugging - any resources or things you can think of? Because omg, functional systems save lives...
I LOVE the meal planning calendar idea and I'm definitely borrowing that now that I'm getting back into the swing of cooking dinner more often, with a new not-soul-sucking job and a very hungry toddler.
I'm curious how you use Gcal and Todoist together? What kinds of tasks live in one vs. the other?
G:Cal is for A Specific Thing Must Happen at a Specific Day and Time. So birthdays, appointments, that kind of thing.
ToDoist I use for "this is a task that has to happen today or this week but I can choose when it happens. I'm self employed so I control some if not most of my schedule.
The thing I like about ToDoist is that it's intuitive. I can type, for example "Do X the last Thursday of every month" and it'll pop up on the final Thursday. "Every six months: schedule oil change." Or, "Every other Monday, water this plant."
I don't know if they can "talk" to each other without a third party service, though.
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.
There are so many attributes that are absolutely part of white supremacy culture that many people in Western culture don't question because those norms have been hegemonic/dominant for so long as to become fully normalized. Of *course* it's better to be punctual, etc etc. De-normalizing is part of what I hope to do with this piece on calendars!
Not sure if this is "Western Culture" - maybe more "Anglo culture". I have lived in Spain and Turkey, as well as places like Ecuador, Mexico, Egypt, China. Everywhere has different codes around time. The Anglo business world has made some inroads in each place, but most people in my experience don't live by a Google Calendar or Outlook. We are a minority (I speak as a former Outlook addict at work and as the current family travel organiser using Google calendar). BTW I'd love to have a good organiser for housework...
We are starting to think more about neuro diversity and people who have issues with time simply think differently. It often has nothing to do with “rudeness.”
This is so interesting! I am also a very punctual person and have had similar struggles with over-valuation of punctuality and the feeling that people aren't 'respecting/valuing my time' when the keep me waiting. I've come to feel like the tension really comes from trying to merge these different ways of thinking about time, forcing one into the other which doesn't work.
I have friends who are always always always late, like VERY late, to everything. But because they feel obligated to operate in a rigidly timed world, they'll feel like they need to say "we are meeting at 9:30" and I'll be frustrated both in advance and at the time because I know that I'll be there on time and they won't, but i'll do it anyway. But over time I've got a lot better about not asking them to make an inevitable-failed attempt at a rigid time structure, and tend to only plan things with them when there's flexibility and openness on time - (i'm open to this during this time period, and open to that during that time period, just let me know when you know where you are at) and it's so much better for all of us!
My husband has a very different concept of time and it’s hard to plan things like movies or shows. If we’re not leaving for someplace together then I’ve learned we each have our ticket and he gets there when he gets there.
I come from the Midwest originally and moved to the deep South some years ago. The culture around time is SO DIFFERENT. But there's also a consensus, like everybody knows that a thing will start between half an hour and an hour after the allotted time.
I am HERE FOR THIS-- I'm an attorney in my professional life, and the fidelity to calendaring/time-keeping/accounting is breathtaking, not only in terms of billing (I could talk about the patriarchy and capitalism and time-keeping/wasting until the cows come home, I think it's so toxic and bullshit) but also in terms of legal outcomes. The function of needing to track putting something into the mailbox by eod two weeks not including holidays or weekends from 72 hours after receiving something or else your whole matter doesn't even make it to arguments on paper may have started to keep matters moving and set expectations, but it seems that it many ways it's evolved into a literal gatekeeping. I have so many thoughts about this...
Oh jeez, I hadn't even thought of that. But yes, the fidelity to calendaring—specifically digital calendaring—also means that everything is hyperaccountable. Which is a good thing in many ways, but for situations like this it feels like a weapon. I've gotten slapped on the wrist for taking a delivery date of, say, November 1 to mean, well, November 1—not the "full working day of November 1." I think of it as the corporate rendering of how people (OK, me, given my points above) might now get grumpy if a friend shows up 7 minutes late without a heads-up via text, whereas 20 years ago we had no problems waiting much longer than that.
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.
"The ideal calendar would be a reverse calendar." Absolutely — and that's in part how my calendar has functioned for me, as a freelancer who has a lot of "empty" time that I get to choose to use as I want, but really revel in that ability to morph it to my needs, instead of me morphing to the time chunk's needs.
I 100% agree. I try, as much as possible with life under capitalism, to have huge blocks of time where I don't know what time it is. I have created a lot of space in my life to make that possible: no kids, easy pets, an aligned religious practice, and inner circle of similar non-planners. It has created so much happiness in my life. I also turn down a lot of things, which has been a tough skill to build, since I really hate saying no, in general. This is challenging, and I know it really bothers some of my friends/hurts their feelings when I'm like, "I'm not scheduling anything new until the end of the month, but we can chat then!" But on the flip side, I try to be forthcoming with spontaneous plans "it's nice out, want to get patio snacks tonight?" And like, if someone is really bothered by my approach of time... well, that's unfortunate, but the world is full of billions of people, one of them might be a better match!
this just reminded me that when in i was in jr high and high school the school would issue each of us a planner at the start of the year. and we were very seriously expected to use them. in 6th grade our planners would get reviewed by our home room teacher at the start of every six weeks and you would get an actual grade based on how you had been using it and recording your homework etc. in retrospect this is INCREDIBLY WEIRD.
The joke's really on me because I was a sixth grade teacher for half my career...and I did the same thing. I checked those planners every single day. I had to sign off on them. I inherited and old, weird system, and I ran with it. Now I have a sixth grader who is like WTF, Mom, and I am at a loss. I agree. INCREDIBLY WEIRD.
i am FASCINATED about why the school system wanted us to know exactly how to do this. Did they ever give y'all a reason? or was it just 'we want kids to know how to use a calendar'? like surely at some point there was a pedagogical starting point for this system.
The reason is the same as for most things, which is we have to teach the kids how to do the things they will need to do as adults...which is also deeply unsatisfying as an answer. There was a lot of pedagogical jargon about executive functioning, but I'm still not swayed that this is THE WAY. To be honest, if a kid was disorganized and didn't do their work, they weren't organized enough to remember to look at their planner or bring their planner home, no matter how many times I signed it. Please someone tell us the answer to the WHY?
This!! As the parent of a 6th grader who struggles w executive functioning, I would love for her to have access to an expansive and developmental experience of what "getting your shit together" could look like so that she could come up with something that feels authentic rather than externally imposed. Teaching kids how to use planners is great for kids who gravitate towards planners! But what about more diverse options! (I don't even know what those are/could be and I can definitely see that it's way "easier" to just focus on one thing in a classroom of 25/30 tweens.)
We had a big issue transitioning from elementary to middle school and remembering homework and I was *shocked* when I found out there weren’t school issued planners any more.
I love that idea. On my work calendar I block “focus” time, makes sense to schedule free time for personal too.
Your comment about your son brought me back to my school planner! Woah I loved those planners we got. I would consider it my creative art piece 🖼 write doodles and notes and plan fun things to do. Digital calendars don’t compare!
If you can figure out what you liked about them, you could re-produce them (or a version of them) as a bullet-journal type paper planner. You can make the layout whatever you want, however it works best for you!!
I do realize this is more work for you -- but if this kind of thing brings you joy then having a planner that works for how YOU work can be amazing. (And you get to doodle or use stickers or fun markers or whatever you want!)
Your 12-yo sounds eminently relatable. My dad (hyper organized and efficient) tried to teach me how to do it when I was in HS. My reaction was: ewwwww!!!! Putting every last thing down on a calendar sounds like all work and no fun. If being a grownup is all work and no fun, I don't wanna!!!! ...
Only now as I approach the end of my PhD am I beginning to realize I want to do amazing science while also having other personal priorities. And it's simply grown to the point where I can no longer fit it all in my head. When I try, stuff I care about goes undone or gets lost. Only with that lens am I starting to seriously come around to the idea of being organized/efficient/calendaring as desirable. Perhaps time will help your 12-yo get there too :)
What I'm only just beginning to realize now though, at 26 rather than 12, is that being a grownup means I have more things that I need (and WANT) to do than are able to fit in my brain all at once. A tool like a calendar is what is required to help me organize things so that I get to have more days that look like: go to work, get work done while I'm there, finish in time to get groceries and make and eat (and clean up after) a meal that's healthy and tasty, and finally finish that in time to make a 7pm live musical performance w/ my bff we'd both been looking forward to. And less that look like: go to work, procrastinate/try to figure out what I'm even supposed to be doing here rn, finally finish up my experiments circa 2am. With no time for any of that other after work stuff because "after work" never really ends up arriving without some sort of efficient plan. All else being equal, team calendar is beginning to look sooooo much more fun to me now than it did when I was 12...
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.
This is super nerdy, but when I was in 6th grade I got really into the history of calendars and did a big presentation on them. There is nothing "naturally" dominant about the Georgian calendar, nothing at all!
I love this, both for the 6th grade girl avidly pursuing an interest and for seeing beyond what’s assumed to be “natural” as not. My favorite visual example is what day of the week calendars start/end and how jarring it can be when it’s different (check carefully when booking flights!)
An interview with David Henkin, the author of _The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are_ might be really interesting!
YES! I am a "Monday-start" person, because absolutely nothing in my conceptual representation of "a week" involves it starting on Sunday, and it REALLY screws me up when I have to work with Sunday-start calendars.
For a large portion of my life I lived on a Tuesday to Monday week. Because Gilmore Girls was on Tuesday. So we talked about it at recess on Wednesday. Thursday was almost the weekend, Friday was FRIDAY! The weekend didn’t count, and on Monday it was almost time for Gilmore Girls again!
+1! Mondays start the week. And fall (whenever school starts) starts the year. It just makes sense. Wtf are we starting a new year in the middle of winter? There is nothing new about that!
Oh, this too! As an academic, the normal "New Years Day" means absolutely nothing to me. My "New Year" is the start of the school year :)
(Except weirdly, my institution makes us do "Faculty Activity Reports" that are calendar-year based. So I'm supposed to somehow think of last Spring plus this Fall as a "unit", and it breaks my brain every single time.)
Oct 6, 2022·edited Oct 6, 2022Liked by Anne Helen Petersen
I was just coming to say this. No jerks, Yom Kippur didn't come "late" October came early. I also sync my google calendar with hebcal. The calendar is so important in terms of who is centered and who is marginalized. Like, what is is 2022 years from? Nothing that matter to me. Why am I, of a people murdered by Romans, referring to anything as Julius or August? I would love to work on truly secularizing the calendar for public purposes like work, school, and government.
I spent Yom Kippur thinking about how “un-YK” it felt to me because of timing. That is, it felt much harder for me to shift into “Jewish time” or “holiday space” this year, which I think had less to do with October and more to do with Wednesday, but both of which are about the multiple calendars on which I live my life.
A colleague tried to schedule a meeting for Wednesday, which I mentally blocked out but had left blank on my semi-updated, semi-public work calendar and another stepped in to gently note it was YK before I said anything. Which was good, but also highlights some of the vexing challenges around calendars and how we use them.
Something similar happened last year at a friend’s company. DEI has a long way to go when it comes to Jewish identities.
I find it hard to operate in a world where my holiday season - which is a month long and includes preparing for four very emotional different holidays (and all the Thanksgiving-level cooking that comes with it!) - is largely ignored. Even working for myself becomes tricky with scheduling. What days are free for scheduling calls? What days are free for work? When can I get my spiritual work done? Why do I feel guilty taking this time, even though the people around me get two weeks off (standard in my industry) for Christmas?
One thing that has helped me manage “Jewish time” is adding the Hebrew calendar to my iPhone. I recently discovered this setting and finally felt seen. Now I know when Rosh Chodesh (first of the month/requires special prayers) is more easily, and minor holidays like Tu B’shvat, without having to find a Jewish calendar or googling it. If only they had a Shabbat times integration.
I also want to mention days and weeks. In the Jewish calendar, days begin at sundown and end the next day at nightfall. This is a different way of thinking about time. When it comes to rituals like the mikvah (immersion following menstrual cycles - and no it’s not about the Western construct of impurity but that’s a different topic) it can get overwhelming! How does one balance tracking period days differently for medical purposes and religious purposes? Jewish women who do this ritual do a lot of “period math” and have a unique relationship with time, and it’s unseen by the outside world and even the men in our own community. Sometimes it feels like I have a work calendar, a social calendar, a personal calendar (self care and medical appts), a family calendar, a Jewish calendar, a period tracker, and a second period tracker, and it’s a lot to keep up with.
Lastly, I hope that when you write about weeks, you mention the religious origin (at least in many cultures; I don’t know enough about week structures and their origins globally to comment). If religion is made by humans, then the subtitle makes sense, but for those who believe religion was made by or even inspired by God (so the belief follows that God invented the week with creation) it’s a bit different. Either way, the idea of a weekend and 7-day time period being a focus in scripture is interesting.
Yes, this. Actually, in relation to weeks, my rabbi mentioned something interesting in his drash at Kol Nidrei - the 7-day week is not a Jewish invention, but something that was already in practice in multiple other ancient Near Eastern civilizations/cultures, as early as Sumer in 2100 BCE. (Though the concept of a rest day on the 7th day of the week is something we can indeed take credit for ;) )
Not new at all. The university where I formerly taught begins its fall term in late September and the first day of classes, always a Wednesday, often coincides with Jewish holy days. I don’t think I ever heard any public acknowledgment of this, much less any discussion of how to manage the conflict for Jewish students, faculty, and staff. (I’m not a religious person myself, but I always let students have any accommodation they needed for religious holidays.)
I know that Columbia and Fordham both have classes on HHD. I think most schools do. But they probably also have classes on Eid al-Fitr and on holy days for other religions. The NYC Dept of Education added Eid and Chinese New Year to days off.
So smart. I don't know why I haven't thought to sync Hebcal before. I feel like every year I scramble to get everything transposed into my work calendar and then spend so long advocating -- no we can't have our Board meeting on Kol Nidre. Yes, Jewish days start at sunset, it's really not that hard folks.
Last year, as part of our DEI work, my org set up an Outlook calendar that just has religious holidays. I owned it, since I was HR, so I basically looked up the major holidays for some major religions (Judaism, Islam, Lunar New Year, some additional Christian holidays like Ash Wednesday) and added them all to the calendar for the next year. I was even able to note when something started the evening before. It's not a perfect solution - no way to automate the dates for future years, and we still had to pick and choose which holidays to add (for the sake of my colleagues I did not add every Jewish holiday lol) - but then everyone could sync it with their own calendars and avoid scheduling meetings on those days. I think the non-Christian people appreciated not having to speak up every time, too - speaking as someone who always had that "do I say something or do I not" debate every year.
I don't use hebcal, but I find our shared office calendar to be a great way to both protect and communicate Jewish Holidays. I can block those days off a year or two in advance, and ensure that they say "holiday" rather than "out of office" on my calendar. In addition to the practical usefulness of not having too many things scheduled on those days, I think it does a lot to normalize the fact that these are a fixed part of the yearly calendar, even if they 'fall' on different days, and not some arbitrary thing.
YES on syncing hebcal + google calendar for work. I've put in "Unavailable" for all holidays for the next three years so things are automatically rejected on my calendar. This was sparked when my boss scheduled a signature event (that I'm apparently required to attend) on Pesach and could not reschedule it.
The way calendars are treated sucks for anyone who isn't Protestant tbh. Certain Catholic holidays don't move around WRT the liturgical year (advent always begins 4 Sundays before Christmas, for example), but there are also certain holidays that are held at the same time on the Gregorian calendar ever year (All Souls day, for example). Unfortunately the important stuff is generally tied to the liturgical calendar over the Gregorian one, so if you don't live in a Catholic area there's always the fun period of trying to find food you can eat for a week for two of February.
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'm planning to tease this out a bit more in the piece, but I think some of that resistance to calendars is symptomatic of the larger resistance to the transformation of academia in general — from a place where (tenured) professors almost exclusively lived "the life of the mind" (research, teaching) to a place where they are increasingly expected to function as part of a larger corporate institution. I absolutely understand that resistance while also understanding the burden it places on their colleagues who have never had that privilege.
I can see that. I also want to bring up that faculty are often overworked and being in a minoritized group makes it even worse. So my resistance to having my calendar freely available really boils down to students want/expect more time with me than their male professors and one way I try to equal the playing field is by being less available - since my male colleagues are often very difficult to schedule with according to students. I'm not saying it's the right thing to do, but it definitely helps me get to my work priorities /gain tenure /promotion. I definitely "perform" being extremely busy in order to protect my time.
yep yep yep. This also makes me think of the fact that when I was a professor (and when I was a student) you didn't make an appt for office hours -- you just showed up and waited. But now, particularly with the "consumer" model of college, "waiting" is a waste; you "deserve" an appointment.
I agree that ideologically the idea of the appointment for office hours reflects changing ideas of the role of the student. However, adding an appointment structure for office hours is the single best thing that I have ever done for myself in my career. I don’t share my personal calendar with students, but rather use a YouCanBook.Me link that never changes (this is synched to my personal calendar). Doing this reduced my email by a significant percentage. I don’t go rounds with students via email scheduling appointments, if a student from a past semester wants to make an appointment they have the link and critically, they use it. I also find that binding them to a time slot makes them use the time more efficiently. It also means that more students don’t turn up for office hours than I have time to meet with, which was becoming a serious problem! I actually offer more hours per week than I used to because I find each session more manageable.
I'm a new professor and teach a relatively small number of students so I don't have as much of a compare and contrast but I also find allowing students to make an appointment much more efficient for both me and my students. My students are much more likely to show up for a specific appointment than a drop-in office hours slot. They make an appointment (via Calendly) and I know exactly who is coming and what they want to talk about versus when I try to hold drop-in office hours and no one shows up but I spend an hour now working deeply because I think I'm about to be interrupted.
Leading to marking times as busy that aren't meetings, but are just times when I feel like getting something done without having a meeting thrown on top of it.
Indeed! So I guess I'm not performing busy, I am actually busy, but I feel the need to talk about being busy rather than just say I have marked off times in my schedule so I can get things done.
and where faculty have the freedom to question whether even corporate jobs should have this sort of access to our calendars.
at the same time, I suspect that many faculty have no clue that staff cannot opt out of something the university is spending a bunch of money on---or that the university is, in fact, spending a bunch of money to be part of the google system
I'm non-faculty academic staff and I absolutely experience the same thing re: attempts to schedule time with (most) faculty. I joke that the use of Google calendar is one of the dividing lines to know if you're "in academia" or "in higher ed." Staff often operate in a different world of expectations and accountability to others, especially around the usage of our time (and justification of our time, as adjunctification is starting to come for staff positions as well).
Related to this I think, I find it interesting that students are often highly encouraged to use a calendar. There is an explicit acknowledgement even by faculty that calendars are useful and often even required to function in this institution. But since students are kind of in between the faculty and staff, I think they get an odd impression of HOW to use a calendar.
Having moved from academia to NGO world, it became incredibly clear to me how much of the resistance to shared calendering in academia was related to the overt status hierarchy of the academic setting. The time and effort of the back-and-forth-email scheduling process was seen as part of the burden of being junior in the hierarchy. I think it has been, at least subconsciously, a feature and not a bug.
I want to point out that historically, professors were old white guys, and wonder at how all of this putting the work of scheduling onto others (lower ranking) echos gender, race, and class inequities.
You know it! I’m old enough that I entered academia (grad school 1987-1993) in the early days of transition to personal desktop computers for everyone. There were many old white guys who refused to use computers well through the end of the century, meaning they used secretarial and admin time to type their papers and exams, schedule their travel, and many other tasks. They occupied a disproportionate amount of staff time, while their job definitions and workloads were also increasing. This includes refusal to use email, which means all of this had to be negotiated in person or over the phone.
When I worked in publishing (1998-2004) the higher-ups proudly and famously did not use email and had their assistants print out their emails, transcribe the (written) responses, and send them back to the author. SUCH a shitty power flex...
This is familiar. I know you’re not exaggerating about 39 emails to schedule one meeting because it’s the same in the university department I worked in for most of my career. Same with people forgetting to attend meetings.
Some folks would show up to regularly scheduled meetings (ie every other Thursday at 3pm) only every third or fourth time, and demand that all discussions and decisions made since they last attended be revisited and rehashed. They were usually accommodated (while I seethed with resentment).
Can confirm that this was similar when I was in the museum world. HR would regularly have to remind staff about limiting reply all usage, and everyone would get distracted enough that we'd end up having meetings in hallways with whomever we could muster.
Chiming in as a staff member at a university. At every university I've worked at, staff are required to use the shared calendar system while faculty can do whatever they want. Whenever I have to schedule a meeting with more than one faculty member, I cry a little first and then wade into a multi-day slog of email just to schedule that one hour.
this feels so familiar. My campus is Outlook not GCal, but basically the same in that non-faculty staff (and, actually, admin who come from faculty) are expected to keep up-to-date digital calendars that are open (busy/free) so others can schedule easily. Faculty have no such expectations. I have to say, as someone who's been on both sides of this, I hate all MS products, but appreciate the convenience of a shared system. I hate feeling like other people can "take" my time, but recognize the efficiency of it. I want to be able to be spontaneous about my time without planning for it, but that seems completely untenable now. Also, I have given over large chunks of my calendar to my students with youcanbook.me, which is another whole essay I don't have time to write. I am forever trying to remember to block off time and make it unavailable for student booking, but also trying to be available for their very real and often also overscheduled needs.
Not necessarily a solution for all, but I'm in a similar situation and have started booking Monday afternoons for my advisees, kind of like office hours for my classes (which i schedule around the course sessions and with the class' input). We've been doing it long enough now that I remember to block the time and my students remember I'll definitely be available.
For me, this is so familiar and so weird at the same time.
Our department uses a shared Outlook calendar. You need a university-issued computer to access it, though. Teaching faculty (aka most of the faculty) don't receive computers, so we're locked out. For me, this is the weird part. In my institution, most of the faculty aren't doing what we want. We're fending for ourselves.
But here's where it gets familiar: When I'm scheduling an appointment, the difference between staff and service-eligible faculty (especially senior faculty) is incredible. Staff use a standardized system, based on their shared calendar. Even though I can't access that calendar, it makes the process so much easier and more flexible. Many service-eligible faculty, on the other hand, use their own apps or systems. So every appointment includes extra portions of labor, confusion and disruption.
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!
This is so dang good, thank you. I also drift into an infinite future but I fill it with bullshit that I also don't want to do but feel like I have to, so maybe I should just try and have a good day today.
Love this response, and this book also changed the way I think about time! I'm trying to remember if it was in this book or somewhere else that a "done list" was suggested? I do that sometimes, create a list of things that I did that day at the end of the day, instead of a "to do list" and I find it comforting when I'm feeling overwhelmed.
All throughout high school and college, I lived with the false hope of curing my anxiety with a notebook. I initially kept separate notebooks for journaling and bullet journaling/life planning/“what are my life goals” listing, but eventually they morphed together into a jumble of half-filled planner spreads and daily brain dumps. Even now, as I begin my first full time job post-college, I’m trying to keep up with a cute weekly bullet journal that I check maybe twice and feel as if it’s another thing on my to-do list (I’ve actually found daily to-do lists much more helpful than lengthy bullet journals, and it keeps me much more grounded in each day). “I can plan for the future forever” seems to sum up why I’ve kept up with hand-drawn calendars for so long- there’s a hope of easing present anxiety by thinking longingly about an unknown future, and planning productivity into that future will take away the scariness of life right now. Spoiler alert: it does not.
Thank you for the book recommendation, it sounds like something I very much need to read myself. I, too, every year around August and again in December, feel the need for a new planner that will "fix everything."
This resonates so much! On the one hand being planned and efficient can create more space to fit in more than matters. But on the other not if we spend all the time planning so much that we forget to actually do the things...
Yes! My other big takeaway from the book so far is the necessity of either breaking the big things into much, much smaller things (like, is "Move into apartment" one to-do or 70?), or just ignoring some of the smaller things. If I have a big thought project at work, I will put it off for WEEKS by justifying that "I can get these emails done quickly, so THEN I can start without any distractions." Guess what! Distractions ARE FOREVER. So maybe just do the big thing.
SO TRUE! And just with the apartment example: when is it 1? (When it's one of the relatively far off of 500 tasks in the move to grad school project, and I don't even know which city it'll end up being in yet...) vs. When is it 70? (well maybe as it gets much closer to happening is a good time to start breaking down all the actual parts that have to happen to do it!)
Same w/ the big projects thing. Insisting on having a 5 hour time block to get this entire presentation done from start to finish in one sitting is how I'm here 'till 2am every day and exhausted all the time!
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.
As someone who also derives satisfaction in crossing things off lists: what *is* that pleasure in constantly doing? One of the articles I'm reading connects it squarely to Boltanski and Chiapello's thinking about "the new spirit of capitalism" — "to be doing something, to move, to change — that is what enjoys prestige."
I don't know if I can answer your question, but I CAN say that managing ADHD and tedious household tasks is easier if I can cross it off the list and see a progression of accomplishment. If I have to remember 6 things that need doing and get the oomph together to get them all done in the same day? It ain't EVER gonna happen, especially without medication - we take our dopamine fix where we can get it, y'know?
I feel like there's a connection between calendars/to do lists and diet culture but can't quite articulate it. Maybe it's just the constant cultural drive to make yourself over into the image of the ideal (thin/hardworking/busy/organized). The pleasure comes from working toward some sort of perfected future tense. Or maybe it's just that after reading Virginia Sole-Smith's Burnt Toast for a few months, I see diet culture *everywhere* now.
Which is, of course, also connected to white supremacy culture, too (as is diet culture). (See comment above re: white supremacy culture and "timeliness")
Yes, totally. Totally. It's the same pattern right? Consolidate power by dictating a single imaginary ideal and encourage/coerce everyone to believe their job is to conform to the ideal. Is there an academic term or concept for the ways that diet culture, white supremacy, grind culture, etc. all look like tentacles of the same shitty monster? I'm googling but I feel like I don't have the right terms.
I too love crossing off/highlighting what’s complete. It took me awhile and some deconditioning work, but when I started thinking of it as a fluid qualitative ritual rather than a pressured productivity milemarker, that changed the game for me personally. The cross off is for me and me alone. I love the visual transition, the highlighter, the crumpling of paper tossed into the recycling, more satisfying than deleting something from a digital list. It feels more sustainable to easily write out once and then recycle paper than to continually use battery power on devices that I’m constantly retyping words on, although I could be wrong about that.
I was also raised by a compulsive list-maker who wasn’t operating by external pressure, and I watched how making the list is actually “counterproductive.” We could distract ourselves endlessly with list-making to mimic the feeling - and challenge - of actual quality doing/moving/changing (which can also occur without a to-do list). I think a lot of us do this, making lists to feel externally productive because capitalism tells us we should be externally productive. And sometimes we just gotta get them out of our heads to free up some processing ram, ha :-)
Yes - the getting-things-out-of-my-head element of list-making is HUGE for me. There's something about writing something down, externally to me, that really lowers my anxiety because I'm no longer worried that I'm going to forget to do something I want to do!
I love the phrasing of "fluid qualitative ritual" - and you're right that the tactile nature of the writing, the crossing, etc., is part of what make it so satisfying.
I would love to know more about your switch from "pressured productivity milemarker" to "fluid qualitative ritual" if you have the time. It's certainly making me think hard about my to do list right now.
Oh, there’s DEFINITELY some overachiever/perfectionist/productivity culture stuff happening with the list-making and item-crossing-off - I have to be very mindful of not letting that run away with me, and being okay with both 1) not crossing off everything on the list if the day or my personal capacity doesn’t allow for it, and 2) crossing off everything on the list and then letting myself rest, rather than feeling those jitters of “what else can I do? I gotta maximize my use of time!”
And also, there’s something about the *record* of it - having a list with crossed-off teams is also a sort of reminder that I did something, that I am present here, that it would be different if I wasn’t here. I also find that satisfying, and helpful - another part of the productivity stuff for me is that I have to do things to earn my spot, and being able to look at the crossed-off list helps soothes that anxiety a little bit.
Oh this. I still have my physical planners from HS and college and every so often I leaf through them and still get a thrill of accomplishment in looking at all the checked off items…
I find it too hard to keep a journal unless I’m traveling, but I keep track of things that happened or what I’m reading or watching in the notes section on each monthly page of my planner!
Big fan of keeping home/work calendars separate! I also opt to carry the second smartphone provided by work, rather than giving work my personal number and downloading work apps to my personal phone (mail, calendar, zoom, slack). Getting a slack message while I'm at the grocery store is a Sunday-ruining occurrence in my books.
YES - I had the option to have a separate work phone at my last job, and that arrangement worked super well for me, but my current job doesn’t offer that option. So far, having the work apps on my phone, but with notifications turned off, has worked to keep those boundaries up.
If you have an iPhone, the new context-specific focuses in iOS 16 are really helpful for separating things out. I have a work focus and a rest focus (and sleep end mornings foci) and they have different Home Screens and different notifications allowed and time of day or location triggers to make them toggle automatically. It helps with differentiating between work and not-work in a single phone.
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 have read on a couple different substacks now about the horrors that are sports scheduling apps. There are so many, none of them as functional as they would ideally be.
Right there with you. Three kids on three soccer teams within the same organization should lead to streamlined scheduling...instead it leads to me making a spreadsheet. Three separate apps, none of them good, and then you need to layer on the snack schedules from SignUp Genius, my text strings on carpools, etc. That's before we ever get to the spousal responsibility negotiation.
I just wanted to tell you that as a mom, and a primary care doctor, I totally hear you! I used to have to manually bypass the scheduling system to see siblings at the same time, it was insane to me because it was easier for everyone if I did it that way but it took an extraordinary amount of effort to make it happen! Also, I have this pipe dream (as a mom) that each of my 3 kids will have a twice yearly "appointment day" and on that day we will take the day off of school and work to do all of their things - dentist, primary care doctor/sports physical, eye doctor, clothing and physical needs, etc. But I've tried and there is so much rescheduling that I can't make it work. (sigh)
Omg, bless all you do for your kids and your community! Please know that my frustration is not at our providers or the lovely schedulers. We know y’all work so hard and are also frustrated by the portals. (It’s been four years and two additional pregnancies /deliveries and My ob team cannot get mychart to remove the “C-section” listed on my medical summary.)
Appt day sounds lovely, can we get a barber/hair stylist involved? It would be so nice to just get it all taken care of at once like that scene in Miss Congeniality!
Yes! I have yet to schedule my kids' flu shots or COVID boosters because I have to call - they can see all three kids at once, but the web scheduler doesn't do that.
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.
I find this so interesting. As a fellow healthcare worker (hospital RN), I also have a dynamic work schedule -- but I didn’t use a calendar until I had kids and needed a way to externalize schedule stuff with my spouse. Your work is hard and I gotta say I envy your ability to truly CLOCK OUT on your days off!!
Oh yeah, I know that not having children truly allows me to live without the external calendar. After working in the ER through covid, that’s when I made it a personal mission to “clock out” after work. It was difficult but I wanted to minimize the stress that I brought home with me.
Godspeed fellow healthcare worker! You’ve got a hard job too.
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 love that you bring up this very real tension: there's something to be gained by orienting life outside the "work" calendar, but also, particularly for clergy I've interviewed about burnout, there's a real exhaustion, too, that accumulates around whatever their faith understandings as the "high" holidays, which also prevents them from experiencing the contemplation that is deemed essential during this time
I am trying to reorient myself to the jewish calendar. Since I'm not a religious professional there are maaaany clashes with capitalism. I started a job this year the day after Tisha b'Av, a fast day which, I'm always wrecked the day after I fast, so I decided not to fast. To be clear I believe strongly that you can choose not to fast for ANY reasons and all choices are equally valid, but I really hated that I was making the choice to prioritize my work life over my spiritual life in that moment. Since my calendar does not align with the Christian calendar that dominates American life there are many, many times where I feel like I'm basically being enforced to observe someone else's religion.
Also: I lived in Southeast Asia for a few years, and the polychromic approach to time there helped me begin to value relationships over efficiency. For instance, when I'd go to the post office in our small town, it was culturally appropriate to make small talk with the postal worker for a while, maybe even have tea, before asking for postage.
Oct 6, 2022·edited Oct 6, 2022Liked by Anne Helen Petersen
I'm non-religious but really appreciate the way you've discussed this. I'm inspired by your approach to think about alternative ways to think about the year, and imagine I will find a similar feeling in the natural (e.g. the solstice). Thank you for this prompt.
I'm worship and work at an Episcopal church. We returned to liturgical worship several years ago because we missed the rhythms of the church calendar - the extended periods during lent and advent to slow down, examine our lives, and recalibrate. Working there (in a non-clergy role), however, had made Advent and Holy Week more busy, which I'm conflicted about. I accept that it's part of the job, but I miss having time to be contemplative.
I'm not religious at all, but it's funny, I live in New England now after growing up and spending most of my life in places with less seasonal variation. The changing of the seasons here gives me the same feeling of time as a spiral vs. a straight line - it's a lot to get used to at first, but every time winter comes around again I'm a little more ready for it.
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!
"A shared calendar is absolutely essential for getting through my day without letting anyone down." I really relate to the fear of letting people down. I am conscientious to a fault when I am able to be and yet I also suffer from chronic debilitating headaches. There are many many days when I am just not able to do all the things I wanted and promised to do. It's so, so frustrating. And no calendar can fix it. I am working on being okay with letting people down. It's hard. It's made me think a lot about all the other things my calendar and my planner can't fix. Like that there are just way too many things to do every single day and I am not a robot.
As a late-diagnosed ADHD'er myself, I have found the Bullet Journal Method to be a huge boon in keeping my sh*t together (or at least portraying the appearance of someone who has their sh*t mostly together). We have a shared household calendar, and my work life is ruled by Outlook, but my bullet journal is the single source of truth for me.
For some, the constant migration from future log to monthly spread to weekly spread can get repetitive, but for me it is essential in being able to effectively plan my days, weeks, and months. And as someone who struggles with executive functioning, being able to cross things off is immensely satisfying and motivating.
It's not an exaggeration to say that bullet journaling has made me a better and more reliable partner, friend, sister, and employee. I often have to refer back to Ryder's book to refresh myself on the "why" from time to time, but when I do I am more mindful, deliberate, and grateful.
Big bullet journal fan over here! I keep one for personal, and one for work. At work I think it's the best way to bring together all the digital to dos (calendar invites, emails, slack messages, verbal requests) and my own goals and priorities without having to fuss over digital format on an app. It's so easy to just write everything in one place and it's faster than adding to a digital list imo. It's also great because at the end of the day, you flip the page! That feeling of a fresh start is so conducive to switching my work brain off for the day.
That would be nice. Since I started working remotely 9 days out of 10, it's increasingly difficult to maintain boundaries between work and life. And I love my job! Keeping one journal instead of two probably doesn't help with that separation. But I LONG for the feeling of being an integrated whole person, instead of two people competing with each other for one person's time.
Absolutely, I totally get that. I once attended a talk by a high-powered woman in my industry who refused to have her assistant maintain a separate calendar. She said, "I'm one person so I have one calendar! My kids' dance recital is on the calendar next to the board meeting." I admire that drive to put equal weight on priorities at home and I fully appreciate the longing to feel like you're a single, fully integrated person.
The main reason why I keep two separate bujos now is that I am actively trying to separate my identity from my job title. The culture I'm in makes it so easy to conflate my success at work with my worth as a person. When I was having a bad day at work it would affect my life at home, so I recognized the need to distance myself and set better boundaries about a year ago. My strategy is pretty generic and includes setting physical boundaries (separate room at home for my desk, separate bujo, separate calendar), and setting time boundaries (leave by 5:30 PM every day). I'm still trying to get it right, and I probably will be trying for the rest of my career.
Another difference between us! I actually identify quite strongly with my job, which is basically software engineering. So I don't mind that overlap, just so long as I have the time to be here for the people I need to.
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 feel this idea of a digital accounting/reminders about your day being creepy. There is something vaguely dystopian about the reminders I get from Google about, say, a dance class I'm taking. Very Black Mirror somehow, to me.
I think this is why I like relying on the paper planner — it relieves that executive function stress but also doesn't remind me (or become visible to others)
Yep! 100% Yep! For such a long time I felt like having a calendar I lived by would make me no fun at all... But now it's finally hitting me that without some degree of advanced planning it's just exponentially harder to make everything fit. And fun things can go on the calendar too! Just having (some of) them occur at a time I previously thought might be a good plan doesn't make inherently fun things less fun!
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 felt this feeling about importance, professionally. For me, it's linked to a looming sense of imposter syndrome, and I often have to fight that impulse when it appears.
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.
Thanks for sharing, this link is great! Love the idea of personal "phases", and thanks for the indirect inspiration to look up a local to me in season veggies chart!
Routines are so important with little kids. We, also, do the same things every day, but not at the same times. I love the idea of creating a kind of "mood board" for remembering dates/events, and I am slowly realizing that I sort of do that with my google photo and what memes from the internet I save at that time, haha. I should make that more formal, see how it feels.
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.
I struggled with this for years - outlook for work, Google for personal. Discovered an app called Calendar Bridge. It's $5 a month, but well worth it for the stress it relieves me by actually syncing the two.
There’s a way to create a url link from the online outlook calendar that you can import in google calendar. It’s not perfect and doesn’t update super frequently but it’s better than toggling back and forth.
I was very frustrated with this, but then I realized I could import them both into my iphone calendar so I had one calendar with everything...and otherwise leave them separate, which really helped with keeping work and life separate (this was when I had a 9-5 job for the first time in decades, which was also my first outlook experience in decades and man did I hate it) (I always have worked fulltime, just not 9-5).
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 REALLY wish the responsiblity for tracking things for work and the family didn't somehow land on me managing the systems so as to avoid managing a crisis - AND YET.
My partner participates actively in household labor and we have a relatively equitable division, but setting up systems to keep things running is on me. I've made clear that this counts as labor and that I'll do it while he cleans the bathroom, at least, which is a partial win.
Right same. I also have a partner who is good at household labor and staying ahead of daily tasks and childcare, but managing our calendar, social schedule and putting systems in place is part of my deal. Without google calendar, it would be so much harder.
My partner also struggles with priorities—if it’s in front of him, he wants to do it right then. It’s great for things like dishes and picking up things, but terrible when we have several competing priorities and are on a schedule. We don’t have time to suddenly dust the ceiling fan bc we need to pack up the baby and put away the dishes before we leave for something, for example.
Omg, same. My husband doesn’t have a reliable to do list system so he has to do things right away or he will forget, and it drives me bonkers.
OMG SAME! Like I appreciate you want to handle a task you see without being asked, but also the baby needs fed and there are dishes to be put away.
He also is really bad at losing his keys and I keep telling him he needs to leave them in one place all the time. That’s what I do! It took him years to finally decide to do it
We just moved house and one of the first things my husband did was set up a place for our keys to live on a bookshelf… so of course I put my keys there when I come home.
EVERY SINGLE DAY he asks me where the keys are and every single day I have to tell him they are in the bowl on the bookshelf where HE decided they would live
My spouse, frustrated with my key-losing, finally bought us Tile. It has made a huge difference. The few times I forget to hang them up, I just click the app.
Same - but my husband won't even use his Google calendar even when I "invite" him to events. So I keep up my home and work calendars on my phone, but if I don't keep up the hand-written wall calendar at home, my husband and daughter don't know what's going on. Drives me bonkers that it's always me, but if I don't do it, no one will. I agree though on the division of labor -- he does other things that I don't do...
I struggle that my husband (it feels almost insincere in this thread to say partner) will see and agree to what’s on the calendar when we add it, but weeks later, act surprised or exasperated because “he didn’t realize that was today,” or “that never made it to his work calendar.” Sometimes it’s a hard same, (my biggest non-relationship struggle is that my company gate keeps our work calendars so almost daily I have to reconcile them both), but the difference is I then need to take on the work of RESCHEDULING or fielding this thing or parts of this thing myself.
Yeah, same. I keep trying to explain how the arranging of everything and organizing and scheduling is an entire job unto itself, but it's been almost 25 years and I haven't gotten far. I wish it weren't so exhausting, but more than that I wish everyone were raised to understand what goes into all of this work!
Yes. This is why I created what I call my "Emotional Labor/Mental Load" Google Workbook and named myself as the CEO/Family Project Manager because once I put it into white-collared terms and systems my husband FINALLY started understanding how much work I do. A previous therapist suggested I do this and I brushed off her suggestion for years because it was once again assigning me more work, but it allows me to remove a lot of anxiety from my brain and onto a Google Sheet that I can minimize in daily life.
The most critical parts of this workbook are the budget sheets and the chore sheets. Once I started tracking literally every dollar we both understood where our money was going. Once I broke down household chores into 110 tasks he understood that "doing laundry" wasn't just one line item but several - "Make sure all dirty clothing and towels are in hampers: inside out if unsoiled, right side out if soiled," "carry clothes downstairs and check lint filters as needed," "Use Spray and Wash on stains", "Hand wash laundry when needed," "Wash laundry in washer (adjust temperature and load size/type first!)," "Hang dry delicate laundry on rack," "Dry rest of laundry in dryer (adjust temperature and load size/type first!)," "Carry dry and clean laundry upstairs in basket(s)," "Fold and put away Laundry".
I think a lot of people would say that I broke it down too much, but as someone with chronic health issues, I need every step to be clear because steps like carrying laundry up and down multiple flights of stairs and folding and putting away laundry can be physically intensive for me.
It's amazing how well the workbook has helped me, if for no other reason than pointing out how little I ask of my husband and how much I do every single day. Suddenly, he feels pretty stupid that he didn't put a new trash bag in the trash can as part of the one chore he was responsible for while I spent my entire evening doing a well-documented list of chores.
I would love to see this template!
Same here! Please!
I will pay money for this.
Hopefully you'll all get a notification with this reply. I go into more detail in a comment on Anne's latest post ("The Diminishing Returns of Calendar Culture") but in brief: I'm still working on it and will share it as soon as I can!
Is there a way we can compensate you for this? It's work!
My spouse, who is a couples/family therapist, built a survey for couples to look at this. But whoa- I love the idea of an ongoing sheet, and my spouse would probably appreciate being able to share something as well.
This is kind of an amazing idea! I'd be interested to try it in my own life. I was trying to explain some of it to my teen son yesterday and got tangled up in my own overwhelm.
I would pay money to see this
Yep. My husband doesn't keep a personal calendar and never looks at my Google personal/family calendar. He also doesn't look at my "Emotional Labor/Mental Load" workbook on Google Sheets, either, which includes our master budget, payment schedule, day-by-day breakdown of everything we spend money on, birthday and holiday cards/gifts, doctors and medications, 110 regular chores sorted by room and frequency, diary of chores completed, packing lists for various scenarios, and lists of various routines. I resented creating all of these lists and calendars for family project management until I realized that doing so would allow me to let go of so much stress in my brain (and it really has lowered my anxiety!) Now that I consider myself to be CEO/Family Project Manager, weirdly enough my relationship with my husband has improved because HE FINALLY UNDERSTANDS how much work I do. So when he complains when I instruct him to finish one measly chore I can point to the five I did.
Your husband may not look at your Google sheets doc, but I’d like to! Seriously, if you had a shareable version of that I’d love to see it.
Aww thank you! Because I have a lot of personal information in there, I don't feel comfortable sharing the original, but what I'll do is create a sharable template version of it when I have some free time this weekend and let you know when it's finished!
Add me to the list. The last thing I want to do is to make a new chore for you by de-personalizing it ... but if you do it, I'd love to see it!
I would LOVE to see the template as well. That is amazing.
absolutely! thank you!
Let us know how we can compensate you for this!
Yes! Please do.
I would love to see this too! Thank you!
I would also love to see it!
I would also love to see it as well, if you are open to sharing with me too
absolutely! thank you!
Yes, I would pay for this! Would love to see the template!
I think that you probably have a crew of humans who would pay for this!
Add me to the list!! I feel overwhelmed by creating these kinds of things. And somehow keep berating myself for not being more organized and on top of all the fucking things. Thank you!
This sounds amazing! Count me in the list of folks who'd love to see it!
I'm feeling like we need a Culture Study post of a de-personalized Wren's Emotional Labor/Mental Load Workbook. It sounds amazing!
Hopefully you'll all get a notification with this reply. I go into more detail in a comment on Anne's latest post ("The Diminishing Returns of Calendar Culture") but in brief: I'm still working on it and will share it as soon as I can!
Finally getting into this *because working/studying full time while also parenting 3 kids* and YES to everything you shared. I was less proactive and more reactive in addressing the division of labor in our home, but this is exactly the core issue. I would love the google doc because mine is a list on a shared Note.
Just now reading these comments and I would also love to see it!
Coincidence or not, my sister and I were talking about the emotional/mental labor of running a household last night and how it lands so heavily on certain genders, especially in heterosexual relationships. I sent her that French comic by Emma on "You should have asked" and the mental load of making a household function and taking care of kids and all that. I think about it a lot.
https://english.emmaclit.com/2017/05/20/you-shouldve-asked/
I stopped doing any of his "stuff". I only washed my clothes. There was food in the fridge. I ate dinner when we planned, if he didn't like it, oh well. He stepped up for a while and then complained that none of his other friend's partners did the same. He did nothing and bitched constantly. I told him to find someone else and left. I thank God that we never had children.
I will only have relationships with men that step up. If I don't have a relationship, so be it. I have found a few but most want a Mom to take care of everything. I am not that person.
The complaints comparing partners--that's absurd. He can't have known what was actually going on in their lives, so using it as a standard for you to uphold was not only unfair, but, well, just as asshole thing to do.
I had a friend who was in a situation where she was constantly getting gaslit by her partner, had high standards of cleaning, had her do all the housework, and I finally had to step away from the friendship as she never realized that the problems stemmed from being matriarchal, not an equal. She even said that they couldn't have kids together because he was enough of a child for her. I think the guy was nice, he just was looking for a mom.
I've lost track of the number of times I've sent Emma's comic to people (women) who wondered why they were so frustrated by *everything* around them.
I also need to note that, as the person in my relationship with the attention deficit issues, I am the opposite end of this. My husband carries the OVERWHELMING share of the mental load in our home. Admitting this, in a room full of (female) colleagues talking about the frustration of the weight can be a really tough thing. I acknowledge that it is, hugely, women who carry this load, but neuroatypicality can flip the script on this one.
It's invaluable! I've lost track, too.
Yep - I send people this, and this Captain Awkward column about household chores - https://captainawkward.com/2013/08/22/506-507-it-is-2fucking0fucking1fucking3-so-why-is-it-so-hard-to-divide-up-household-chores/ - all the time.
Damn right:
"Repeat after me: 'Fucking adults can make a fucking sandwich if they are fucking hungry.'”
LOL!
this comic is amazing. thank you for sharing!
Isn't it? I am kind of in awe about how well the comic creator captured a dynamic that's actually very difficult to describe precisely because of the invisibility noted.
Others are noting how, of course, in heterosexual relationships the burden of calendar management is disproportionally one more thing that's piled onto the category of unseen/undervalued "women's work"... as I reflect on my own last fifteen years, while I now am the more flex/primary caregiver/household maintainer parent, not long ago I was in one of those (still disproportionally male) executive roles where there is somebody else (almost always a woman, still) who "manages your calendar" and so of course this is one more of those situations (like all caregiving professions) where the "women's work" assumption is permeable between both the domestic and professional sphere and how I 100% wouldn't have thought about that if my wife and I both still worked out of the home.
Yep, yep, yep. My husband has never had to manage a calendar at work because when he was a lower-level employee his tasks were assigned to him (by his boss's secretary) and now that he's established he has his own secretary to manage his calendar.
One of the most challenging parts of my teenage years in relation to my parents was that my dad changed jobs and started a business where his office was in the house. He’d always had a secretary and he was terrible at things like filing. Filing became part of my “chores” (I think maybe he wrote off my allowance that way?). If I left it to do too long, or he couldn’t find things he just couldn’t handle it; he was holding me to the standard of the adult women whose job it had been before, To this day, I loathe filing and try never to do it.
My dad ensured that I would hate all future office jobs by having me cover for his secretary when she went on holiday. Absolutely loathed the role.
Gradually I tried a few more office jobs, and but myself well enough to not ever try to run someone else's schedule/be an office mom. It has somewhat limited my career path, but I'm okay with it.
lol howwww many conversations of
me: "wait but we were talking about doing x thing on Saturday"
him: "you did not put it on the calendar, how am i supposed to remember" /myfault
we have a pair of friends, and their kids, who actually say "if it's not on the calendar, it's not real". One partner has hard-core trained her family to PUT IT ON THE CALENDAR.
Yes, this! I am the main scheduler in my family and the amount of time it takes to make calendaring work for me (I need google for home + outlook for work + written planner for my brain) + then jiggering it to work for my spouse is enough to make flames come out of my ears. I subscribe to the "he's an adult, he can make his own fucking sandwich" (see above) model of living, but if I want him to show up/don't want to have a disagreement about it for the 10,000th time, well, 🤷🏻♀️
That last point can be a crux of a lot of the issues, and why it's all so maddening.
As the main care-person of our home and a full time employee of a company, I use a digital calendar to offload both the bullshit and important things into one space because my heart and brain simply aren’t that big.
“Follow-up on X’s mammogram results” (care, important) sits next to “All Hands Onsite Meeting” (bullshit, also…important?), which is a little gross.
Also, my teenager refuses to use Google Calendar (outright ignores my invites) bc he says can hold it all in his head. And he’s right…for now.
LOL the point of the calendar is that he doesn’t have to hold it all in his head—the calendar does. This sounds like some early efforts to offload this work on a woman
Oh I KNOW. And not in a “haha, boys… so funny way, what can you do???” way. You better believe this is an ongoing discussion with him about gendered and invisible labor. Thank you for calling that out, you are 100% correct.
I’m a little extra sensitive to these things because 1. My parents heavily buy into gender roles despite routinely not following themselves and 2. My MIL (a SAHP) raised 3 boys and, in some ways, she did a really good job because they are good at pitching in without being asked, cleaning up after themselves, etc. But in other ways, they are clearly used to someone taking care of things for them as evidenced by the fact that all three of them still call mom for input on fairly routine decisions. Luckily, my MIL is great and doesn’t butt in or anything, but it’s a difference I’ve definitely noticed
I was not a calendar person until my ux product spouse and big law wore me down. I think I was more a routine person.
I do use them differently, though. But they shaped my relationship to calendar keeping.
I've been the calendar manager in almost two decades of marriage, but something interesting happened when I moved across the country for a visiting gig for two years. During the first year, my husband accidentally double-booked a visit from an out of town friend the same weekend he had tickets to fly to see me. It was the inciting incident for us to shift to a hard copy family calendar hanging on the kitchen wall that we both put notes on and consult. (I have a work Google calendar with some notes overlap.) It has worked very well, even after having a kid, although the kid is only 2 and I know things will just get more complicated.
I will be sending this to my spouse, who is the person in our house who carries the mental load/does the bulk of the scheduling/keeps the calendar functioning. He has the unenviable task of trying to keep an ADD spouse ( and 2 pretty-much adult kids, also with ADD, when they're around) on the same scheduling page.
I will formally and freely admit that I suck at time management, but not in the sense of necessarily actual poor management, but mostly because I am natural night owl and people demand rigid adherence to their time scripts even in the age of artificial lighting and urban living. (Buddy, shut up about the damn cows, you ain't milking Bessy tomorrow morning. Aside from that the fact, that the vampire jokes have been made many times over the last 35-40 years so howabout you maybe try and come up with something original since I hate all fucking vampires, except Blade.)
On the other hand, I am pretty good at managing a household if allowed to do so (especially when there were the very modern blessings of 24-hour grocery stores).
So: 1) I notice that people, in the era of diversifying sexual orientations actual (or avowed) practical feminism and the like, cling ever more intensely to rigid gender roles, very much including women (even when they are complaining about them). I first encountered that when I was 17 and cooking something and an old lady came in to gawk at me cooking, ask me if I was gay (she was displeased when I said no, since obviously...), and then insisted she never heard of no man cooking. Then I was caught by surprise; these days, I would say something like, 'Have you ever considered fucking off, lady?'
2) I frequently observed the case when a woman in question is 'doing the housework' and then finishes, proceeds to drag out the wooden cross and three long nails. The problem of course, is that if you do those chores for them, they then get angry about it: you've deprived of something to complain about.
3) On the other, I have certainly noticed that people who do the housework (i.e. me, a not-female person) get dunked on for doing the housework. The problem is gender-identified but not about gender per se: cleaning the toilet is low-status work. (See all those dudes who don't clean the toilet when they're single.)
4) On the history of the rigid imposition of time standards, there is nothing better than this episode of Connections by James Burke: https://archive.org/details/james-burke-connections_s01e05 (It was made in 1978, so it totally has 70's hair and giant computers and punch cards and also just about everything everyone complains about with computers and modern life is right there.)
Yes, the tick tock of keeping up with demands was imposed for good reasons and also a number of bad ones.
elm
does the toilet paper goes over the top or underneath the dispenser?
Can I also add that so many women have set themselves reminders to buy and send birthday cards. Does anyone know of any men under the age of 70 who buy and send birthday cards? I don’t know any. I don’t even get cards from friends. Ia this a regional/cultural thing?
It HAS to be, because no one I know does it. We keep a birthday calendar of birthdays of people who we need to get presents for - maybe 10 people total? Including my mom and my nieces? But also my husband gets the presents for his side of the family so that's a shared calendar.
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.
"Basically, past me and present me work together to help future me because all of me never knows what day it is." - This <3
Are you into the Lazy Genuis?
TLG has my whole heart
All of it. It is becoming a personality.
Meredith, me too. Direct quote to my best friend this morning: "it's unbelievable how much I rely on the LG." (Actually, I said 'sad' instead of unbelievable, but I didn't mean sad at all, I meant... unbelievable.)
Team LG unite! She's such a kind permission-giver.
i would also check out the popcast with knox and jamie (@thepopcast on insta) they're friends with kendra irl and kendra thinks of erin their coo/producer as her muse!
I'm going to have to look this up!
Do it! Such a gentle frame for achieving outcomes
Yes! But also I still feel bad about myself because I’m still more overwhelmed/anxiety ridden to consider myself either fully lazy or a genius, more a deer caught in headlights 80% of the time.
I bet you are doing a lot better than you give yourself credit for. And LG principal of being kind to yourself & your people!
My meal planning calendar is just a bunch of dinner "events" that I shuffle forward in time and organize into a menu for the week. It's so easy. Google Calendar is so powerful when harnessed for good.
You're so right. And I find that at 4pm when it's time to think about dinner, I don't have the brain energy to decide what to make and hunt down the ingredients. If I look back at past menus, or I have pre-populated suggestions I can move around, coming up with a meal plan (and a grocery list) is a lot easier. I do So Much with G:Cal to avoid decision fatigue.
I'm so thrilled to find others who use Google calendar for meal planning!
I have tried to introduce others to the wonders of a meal planning sub-calendar and have been met with skepticism and responses like I'm really odd.
Personally it's life saving, I set stuff to repeat. I started with dinners that went over well (say spaghetti) and thought "I should make this again!" But then I weighed how often the family could tolerate it being served and how often I could tolerate fixing it. So I 'd set an initial interval of 6-week repeat, say. Maybe tweak it after a few repeats, longer or shorter. Build from there.
Currently I have a bunch of theme nights (bean & rice, tacos, soup, pasta, etc) that I do on a 13 week repeat during the school year, which is to say 13week intervals X3. So we only have cuban black beans with brown rice 3x during the school year, everyone is happy when it comes back around.
Summers have such a variation in schedules and available produce that I break with the school year menus and haven't quite gotten much of rhythm going
I will note that my daughter was diagnosed with Celiac when she was 5 (as well as a dairy allergy), so we eat at home way more than others, and 14 years ago there was way way way less GF "convenience" foods nor could we easily eat out, so it was vital that I got organized for meal planning
I love it! I manage a weekly meal calendar pretty well, but I’m not disciplined enough for this wonderfully efficient approach. And I have a family that “likes spontaneity.” So we eat a lot of eggs. Ha!
Eggs are breakfast/lunch, my 16yo son is an ovovore when scrounging his own meals.
Also I have "cancelled" whatever planned dinner was on the calendar if there's too much leftovers in the fridge. This hasn't happened as much in the teen years, especially with the 16yo having reached 6'6". Leftovers are now sacred for packed lunches.
And I will totally bail on the calendar plan if I am just not feeling the planned meal. Say the weather doesn't match, it's cold and rainy and everyone has a head cold, let's do chicken noodle soup. Or it's an unseasonably warm day in April, let's grill something and eat outside. But the schedule has my back when I don't want to think/decide.
Hello! I use Google Calendar for meal planning too. One thing I find useful is using the function where you can import from a spreadsheet, so we have a big list of meals we all enjoy as a family and create a spreadsheet for a whole month if we find the mental energy - we sometimes create a basic plan for one week and copy that across the month, then change it ad-hoc when we fancy a change. Sounds a bit boring I guess but Friday is always pizza night, Monday is always spaghetti, why fight it ;) - I guess that's like what you were saying about decision fatigue. Having said all this, in practice over the last couple of months we've been quite busy and life has been chaotic, and we've ended up planning only a week or two in advance.
Generally once we have the meal plan sorted, my wife and I share putting the weekly online order together - I are sure we have all the evening meal stuff, and she gets the breakfast/lunch bits. Then we have a shared list on Todoist for stuff like washing powder and toilet paper that we add to through the week and between us we make sure all that is added before the order is finalised.
Ah, Matt, you and your wife are our kind of people! I'm totally entranced by the concept of importing the spreadsheet data, and will be figuring out how to do this soon.
it's a bit fiddly to start with (or at least it was for me!) - here's a link and I can share a template if you like https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/37118
Thank you so much for these examples! I'm over here furiously taking notes!
Stealing the birthday reminders thing, that is SO so smart!!
Thank you! I really wanted to be a better correspondent, and I LOVE when I get birthday cards from faraway friends, so I wanted to do the same for the people I like. :) The calendar event for someone's birthday can also serve as a log of what I've sent in past years, and if I see something that I know would be perfect, I can either order it and leave a note on my calendar where it is, or I can leave a link in the calendar description field, and use that when it's time.
Your Valentines plan ... OMG.
SAVED. MY. BACON so many times. The key is to buy Valentine's (if candy is allowed in the first place) that aren't chocolate. So sour candy, lollipops were one of my favorites. And on Feb 15 they're all 50-75% off.
birthday reminders have been the simplest way to keep up with friendships, specially now that i dont use facebook as often.
I'm already doing some of this (birthday and deathday reminders), but wow, these are absolutely genius ideas. Love the Valentine one. Thank you for the idea!!
I love keeping track of my friends’ birthdays this way
I feel all of this in my BONES. Though, I should also add that my partner participates equally for the things that he notices. Our family agrees that "if it isn't on the calendar, it does not exist!"
Wait, what's this course and where can we find it? I think I'm like... 2/3 of the way in to what you're doing there and it needs refining, I want to pick your brain.
I hosted them both at organization academy.com but please feel free to ask questions? I'm happy to explain for you!
Also, if it helps anyone else: I have shared calendars with my husband for family stuff (we each see where the other is supposed to be), and each kid has a calendar (they're too young to manage their own, my oldest is 8). Both parents see all calendars, and they're all color-coordinated.
This means that I can look at the week's calendar and be like 'Middle Kid has pizza day Wednesday, and Oldest Kid has a dentist appointment which Parent 1 is driving her to on Friday, and Youngest Kid has an emergency apt at that time so it's gotta be Parent 2' in a glance via color-coding, as opposed to trying to figure out which calendar line is for who - because they're still at the age where THEIR appointments rely on and impact our schedules. It seems complex but it DOES work.
Specifically, I'm currently looking for tips on shared task management via google calendar - google does tasks, but not recurring shared tasks that I can find, and that's the current block on my household. We combine it with any.do but that's been bugging - any resources or things you can think of? Because omg, functional systems save lives...
I use Todoist and export to G:cal. I think its functionality is primo and intuitive.
I LOVE the meal planning calendar idea and I'm definitely borrowing that now that I'm getting back into the swing of cooking dinner more often, with a new not-soul-sucking job and a very hungry toddler.
I'm curious how you use Gcal and Todoist together? What kinds of tasks live in one vs. the other?
G:Cal is for A Specific Thing Must Happen at a Specific Day and Time. So birthdays, appointments, that kind of thing.
ToDoist I use for "this is a task that has to happen today or this week but I can choose when it happens. I'm self employed so I control some if not most of my schedule.
The thing I like about ToDoist is that it's intuitive. I can type, for example "Do X the last Thursday of every month" and it'll pop up on the final Thursday. "Every six months: schedule oil change." Or, "Every other Monday, water this plant."
I don't know if they can "talk" to each other without a third party service, though.
ToDoIst can be added as one of "My Calendars" in GCal, I think the directions on how to add it are in ToDoIst FAQs.
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.
There are so many attributes that are absolutely part of white supremacy culture that many people in Western culture don't question because those norms have been hegemonic/dominant for so long as to become fully normalized. Of *course* it's better to be punctual, etc etc. De-normalizing is part of what I hope to do with this piece on calendars!
The seminar I mentioned from The Adaway Group is available for free—it's 60 minutes and worth it IMHO. May be helpful as you research the piece. https://whitenessatwork.com/replay/?mc_cid=cda20dd169&mc_eid=4b544815e0
Checking this out - thank you!!
Not sure if this is "Western Culture" - maybe more "Anglo culture". I have lived in Spain and Turkey, as well as places like Ecuador, Mexico, Egypt, China. Everywhere has different codes around time. The Anglo business world has made some inroads in each place, but most people in my experience don't live by a Google Calendar or Outlook. We are a minority (I speak as a former Outlook addict at work and as the current family travel organiser using Google calendar). BTW I'd love to have a good organiser for housework...
We are starting to think more about neuro diversity and people who have issues with time simply think differently. It often has nothing to do with “rudeness.”
My comment below goes into this as well, and it's something I wish a lot more Americans were aware of, even if some Americans ARE polychronic.
I'm pretty sure that this is where the lazy Mexican trope comes from.
This is so interesting! I am also a very punctual person and have had similar struggles with over-valuation of punctuality and the feeling that people aren't 'respecting/valuing my time' when the keep me waiting. I've come to feel like the tension really comes from trying to merge these different ways of thinking about time, forcing one into the other which doesn't work.
I have friends who are always always always late, like VERY late, to everything. But because they feel obligated to operate in a rigidly timed world, they'll feel like they need to say "we are meeting at 9:30" and I'll be frustrated both in advance and at the time because I know that I'll be there on time and they won't, but i'll do it anyway. But over time I've got a lot better about not asking them to make an inevitable-failed attempt at a rigid time structure, and tend to only plan things with them when there's flexibility and openness on time - (i'm open to this during this time period, and open to that during that time period, just let me know when you know where you are at) and it's so much better for all of us!
My husband has a very different concept of time and it’s hard to plan things like movies or shows. If we’re not leaving for someplace together then I’ve learned we each have our ticket and he gets there when he gets there.
I come from the Midwest originally and moved to the deep South some years ago. The culture around time is SO DIFFERENT. But there's also a consensus, like everybody knows that a thing will start between half an hour and an hour after the allotted time.
I am HERE FOR THIS-- I'm an attorney in my professional life, and the fidelity to calendaring/time-keeping/accounting is breathtaking, not only in terms of billing (I could talk about the patriarchy and capitalism and time-keeping/wasting until the cows come home, I think it's so toxic and bullshit) but also in terms of legal outcomes. The function of needing to track putting something into the mailbox by eod two weeks not including holidays or weekends from 72 hours after receiving something or else your whole matter doesn't even make it to arguments on paper may have started to keep matters moving and set expectations, but it seems that it many ways it's evolved into a literal gatekeeping. I have so many thoughts about this...
Oh jeez, I hadn't even thought of that. But yes, the fidelity to calendaring—specifically digital calendaring—also means that everything is hyperaccountable. Which is a good thing in many ways, but for situations like this it feels like a weapon. I've gotten slapped on the wrist for taking a delivery date of, say, November 1 to mean, well, November 1—not the "full working day of November 1." I think of it as the corporate rendering of how people (OK, me, given my points above) might now get grumpy if a friend shows up 7 minutes late without a heads-up via text, whereas 20 years ago we had no problems waiting much longer than that.
I'm checking out Whiteness at Work now! Thank you for sharing.
this is VERY interesting to me thank you for bringing it up im going to check out your links!
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.
"The ideal calendar would be a reverse calendar." Absolutely — and that's in part how my calendar has functioned for me, as a freelancer who has a lot of "empty" time that I get to choose to use as I want, but really revel in that ability to morph it to my needs, instead of me morphing to the time chunk's needs.
I 100% agree. I try, as much as possible with life under capitalism, to have huge blocks of time where I don't know what time it is. I have created a lot of space in my life to make that possible: no kids, easy pets, an aligned religious practice, and inner circle of similar non-planners. It has created so much happiness in my life. I also turn down a lot of things, which has been a tough skill to build, since I really hate saying no, in general. This is challenging, and I know it really bothers some of my friends/hurts their feelings when I'm like, "I'm not scheduling anything new until the end of the month, but we can chat then!" But on the flip side, I try to be forthcoming with spontaneous plans "it's nice out, want to get patio snacks tonight?" And like, if someone is really bothered by my approach of time... well, that's unfortunate, but the world is full of billions of people, one of them might be a better match!
I applaud this and want this. I love the way you give an example of how you respond to friends. Thank you!
this just reminded me that when in i was in jr high and high school the school would issue each of us a planner at the start of the year. and we were very seriously expected to use them. in 6th grade our planners would get reviewed by our home room teacher at the start of every six weeks and you would get an actual grade based on how you had been using it and recording your homework etc. in retrospect this is INCREDIBLY WEIRD.
The joke's really on me because I was a sixth grade teacher for half my career...and I did the same thing. I checked those planners every single day. I had to sign off on them. I inherited and old, weird system, and I ran with it. Now I have a sixth grader who is like WTF, Mom, and I am at a loss. I agree. INCREDIBLY WEIRD.
i am FASCINATED about why the school system wanted us to know exactly how to do this. Did they ever give y'all a reason? or was it just 'we want kids to know how to use a calendar'? like surely at some point there was a pedagogical starting point for this system.
The reason is the same as for most things, which is we have to teach the kids how to do the things they will need to do as adults...which is also deeply unsatisfying as an answer. There was a lot of pedagogical jargon about executive functioning, but I'm still not swayed that this is THE WAY. To be honest, if a kid was disorganized and didn't do their work, they weren't organized enough to remember to look at their planner or bring their planner home, no matter how many times I signed it. Please someone tell us the answer to the WHY?
This!! As the parent of a 6th grader who struggles w executive functioning, I would love for her to have access to an expansive and developmental experience of what "getting your shit together" could look like so that she could come up with something that feels authentic rather than externally imposed. Teaching kids how to use planners is great for kids who gravitate towards planners! But what about more diverse options! (I don't even know what those are/could be and I can definitely see that it's way "easier" to just focus on one thing in a classroom of 25/30 tweens.)
"...being shocked into living my life the way that I said I would live it." Wow. This. So much this.
We had a big issue transitioning from elementary to middle school and remembering homework and I was *shocked* when I found out there weren’t school issued planners any more.
I love that idea. On my work calendar I block “focus” time, makes sense to schedule free time for personal too.
Your comment about your son brought me back to my school planner! Woah I loved those planners we got. I would consider it my creative art piece 🖼 write doodles and notes and plan fun things to do. Digital calendars don’t compare!
Yes! That's what is missing from digital calendars: the art, the creativity, the JOY!
I love love loved my school planners! I honestly sometimes wish I could still get them because they were the best ones I've ever had.
I just bought a school planner for my 45-year-old self!
oooh, can you share a link to the one you got?
It is not (that) cute and it's from amazon but I am loving it? https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B091TNLFWX/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1
If you can figure out what you liked about them, you could re-produce them (or a version of them) as a bullet-journal type paper planner. You can make the layout whatever you want, however it works best for you!!
I do realize this is more work for you -- but if this kind of thing brings you joy then having a planner that works for how YOU work can be amazing. (And you get to doodle or use stickers or fun markers or whatever you want!)
I just absolutely had to reply to say I love the way you write. It is both lighthearted and serious and it makes so happy.
That’s so kind. Thank you. I love this community.
Your 12-yo sounds eminently relatable. My dad (hyper organized and efficient) tried to teach me how to do it when I was in HS. My reaction was: ewwwww!!!! Putting every last thing down on a calendar sounds like all work and no fun. If being a grownup is all work and no fun, I don't wanna!!!! ...
Only now as I approach the end of my PhD am I beginning to realize I want to do amazing science while also having other personal priorities. And it's simply grown to the point where I can no longer fit it all in my head. When I try, stuff I care about goes undone or gets lost. Only with that lens am I starting to seriously come around to the idea of being organized/efficient/calendaring as desirable. Perhaps time will help your 12-yo get there too :)
What's so interesting is you are persuading me the other way round with "If being a grownup is all work and no fun, I don't wanna!!!!"...
Glad I could help foster empathy!
What I'm only just beginning to realize now though, at 26 rather than 12, is that being a grownup means I have more things that I need (and WANT) to do than are able to fit in my brain all at once. A tool like a calendar is what is required to help me organize things so that I get to have more days that look like: go to work, get work done while I'm there, finish in time to get groceries and make and eat (and clean up after) a meal that's healthy and tasty, and finally finish that in time to make a 7pm live musical performance w/ my bff we'd both been looking forward to. And less that look like: go to work, procrastinate/try to figure out what I'm even supposed to be doing here rn, finally finish up my experiments circa 2am. With no time for any of that other after work stuff because "after work" never really ends up arriving without some sort of efficient plan. All else being equal, team calendar is beginning to look sooooo much more fun to me now than it did when I was 12...
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.
This is super nerdy, but when I was in 6th grade I got really into the history of calendars and did a big presentation on them. There is nothing "naturally" dominant about the Georgian calendar, nothing at all!
I love this, both for the 6th grade girl avidly pursuing an interest and for seeing beyond what’s assumed to be “natural” as not. My favorite visual example is what day of the week calendars start/end and how jarring it can be when it’s different (check carefully when booking flights!)
An interview with David Henkin, the author of _The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are_ might be really interesting!
YES! I am a "Monday-start" person, because absolutely nothing in my conceptual representation of "a week" involves it starting on Sunday, and it REALLY screws me up when I have to work with Sunday-start calendars.
For a large portion of my life I lived on a Tuesday to Monday week. Because Gilmore Girls was on Tuesday. So we talked about it at recess on Wednesday. Thursday was almost the weekend, Friday was FRIDAY! The weekend didn’t count, and on Monday it was almost time for Gilmore Girls again!
+1! Mondays start the week. And fall (whenever school starts) starts the year. It just makes sense. Wtf are we starting a new year in the middle of winter? There is nothing new about that!
Oh, this too! As an academic, the normal "New Years Day" means absolutely nothing to me. My "New Year" is the start of the school year :)
(Except weirdly, my institution makes us do "Faculty Activity Reports" that are calendar-year based. So I'm supposed to somehow think of last Spring plus this Fall as a "unit", and it breaks my brain every single time.)
It breaks my brain just thinking about this.
I was just coming to say this. No jerks, Yom Kippur didn't come "late" October came early. I also sync my google calendar with hebcal. The calendar is so important in terms of who is centered and who is marginalized. Like, what is is 2022 years from? Nothing that matter to me. Why am I, of a people murdered by Romans, referring to anything as Julius or August? I would love to work on truly secularizing the calendar for public purposes like work, school, and government.
I spent Yom Kippur thinking about how “un-YK” it felt to me because of timing. That is, it felt much harder for me to shift into “Jewish time” or “holiday space” this year, which I think had less to do with October and more to do with Wednesday, but both of which are about the multiple calendars on which I live my life.
A colleague tried to schedule a meeting for Wednesday, which I mentally blocked out but had left blank on my semi-updated, semi-public work calendar and another stepped in to gently note it was YK before I said anything. Which was good, but also highlights some of the vexing challenges around calendars and how we use them.
Ugh yes. I had a workplace schedule a DEI training on Yom Kippur and then FOLLOW UP WITH ME when I declined it.
That is really something - and something NOT GOOD. (Personally, I'm always glad when the HHD are not on the weekend, but midweek does feel weird.)
Something similar happened last year at a friend’s company. DEI has a long way to go when it comes to Jewish identities.
I find it hard to operate in a world where my holiday season - which is a month long and includes preparing for four very emotional different holidays (and all the Thanksgiving-level cooking that comes with it!) - is largely ignored. Even working for myself becomes tricky with scheduling. What days are free for scheduling calls? What days are free for work? When can I get my spiritual work done? Why do I feel guilty taking this time, even though the people around me get two weeks off (standard in my industry) for Christmas?
One thing that has helped me manage “Jewish time” is adding the Hebrew calendar to my iPhone. I recently discovered this setting and finally felt seen. Now I know when Rosh Chodesh (first of the month/requires special prayers) is more easily, and minor holidays like Tu B’shvat, without having to find a Jewish calendar or googling it. If only they had a Shabbat times integration.
I also want to mention days and weeks. In the Jewish calendar, days begin at sundown and end the next day at nightfall. This is a different way of thinking about time. When it comes to rituals like the mikvah (immersion following menstrual cycles - and no it’s not about the Western construct of impurity but that’s a different topic) it can get overwhelming! How does one balance tracking period days differently for medical purposes and religious purposes? Jewish women who do this ritual do a lot of “period math” and have a unique relationship with time, and it’s unseen by the outside world and even the men in our own community. Sometimes it feels like I have a work calendar, a social calendar, a personal calendar (self care and medical appts), a family calendar, a Jewish calendar, a period tracker, and a second period tracker, and it’s a lot to keep up with.
Lastly, I hope that when you write about weeks, you mention the religious origin (at least in many cultures; I don’t know enough about week structures and their origins globally to comment). If religion is made by humans, then the subtitle makes sense, but for those who believe religion was made by or even inspired by God (so the belief follows that God invented the week with creation) it’s a bit different. Either way, the idea of a weekend and 7-day time period being a focus in scripture is interesting.
Yes, this. Actually, in relation to weeks, my rabbi mentioned something interesting in his drash at Kol Nidrei - the 7-day week is not a Jewish invention, but something that was already in practice in multiple other ancient Near Eastern civilizations/cultures, as early as Sumer in 2100 BCE. (Though the concept of a rest day on the 7th day of the week is something we can indeed take credit for ;) )
Mine too - they sent an email the day of YK to reschedule a cultural responsiveness training.
That's a SPECIAL kind of ... wow.
OK - Twice! Both in higher ed. Enraging.
There was just something on Ask A Manager about this recently, I think! I'd say it's wild, but, well, it's nothing new really, lol
Not new at all. The university where I formerly taught begins its fall term in late September and the first day of classes, always a Wednesday, often coincides with Jewish holy days. I don’t think I ever heard any public acknowledgment of this, much less any discussion of how to manage the conflict for Jewish students, faculty, and staff. (I’m not a religious person myself, but I always let students have any accommodation they needed for religious holidays.)
I know that Columbia and Fordham both have classes on HHD. I think most schools do. But they probably also have classes on Eid al-Fitr and on holy days for other religions. The NYC Dept of Education added Eid and Chinese New Year to days off.
So smart. I don't know why I haven't thought to sync Hebcal before. I feel like every year I scramble to get everything transposed into my work calendar and then spend so long advocating -- no we can't have our Board meeting on Kol Nidre. Yes, Jewish days start at sunset, it's really not that hard folks.
Except iCal consistently screws this up! I can’t count the number of times they listed the first day of Pesach on the day when it was the first night.
Yeah, that's one of the reasons I switched to GCal!
Last year, as part of our DEI work, my org set up an Outlook calendar that just has religious holidays. I owned it, since I was HR, so I basically looked up the major holidays for some major religions (Judaism, Islam, Lunar New Year, some additional Christian holidays like Ash Wednesday) and added them all to the calendar for the next year. I was even able to note when something started the evening before. It's not a perfect solution - no way to automate the dates for future years, and we still had to pick and choose which holidays to add (for the sake of my colleagues I did not add every Jewish holiday lol) - but then everyone could sync it with their own calendars and avoid scheduling meetings on those days. I think the non-Christian people appreciated not having to speak up every time, too - speaking as someone who always had that "do I say something or do I not" debate every year.
I don't use hebcal, but I find our shared office calendar to be a great way to both protect and communicate Jewish Holidays. I can block those days off a year or two in advance, and ensure that they say "holiday" rather than "out of office" on my calendar. In addition to the practical usefulness of not having too many things scheduled on those days, I think it does a lot to normalize the fact that these are a fixed part of the yearly calendar, even if they 'fall' on different days, and not some arbitrary thing.
(Also gmar tov! I hope your yom kippur observance was exactly as you wanted you wanted!)
YES on syncing hebcal + google calendar for work. I've put in "Unavailable" for all holidays for the next three years so things are automatically rejected on my calendar. This was sparked when my boss scheduled a signature event (that I'm apparently required to attend) on Pesach and could not reschedule it.
The way calendars are treated sucks for anyone who isn't Protestant tbh. Certain Catholic holidays don't move around WRT the liturgical year (advent always begins 4 Sundays before Christmas, for example), but there are also certain holidays that are held at the same time on the Gregorian calendar ever year (All Souls day, for example). Unfortunately the important stuff is generally tied to the liturgical calendar over the Gregorian one, so if you don't live in a Catholic area there's always the fun period of trying to find food you can eat for a week for two of February.
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'm planning to tease this out a bit more in the piece, but I think some of that resistance to calendars is symptomatic of the larger resistance to the transformation of academia in general — from a place where (tenured) professors almost exclusively lived "the life of the mind" (research, teaching) to a place where they are increasingly expected to function as part of a larger corporate institution. I absolutely understand that resistance while also understanding the burden it places on their colleagues who have never had that privilege.
I can see that. I also want to bring up that faculty are often overworked and being in a minoritized group makes it even worse. So my resistance to having my calendar freely available really boils down to students want/expect more time with me than their male professors and one way I try to equal the playing field is by being less available - since my male colleagues are often very difficult to schedule with according to students. I'm not saying it's the right thing to do, but it definitely helps me get to my work priorities /gain tenure /promotion. I definitely "perform" being extremely busy in order to protect my time.
yep yep yep. This also makes me think of the fact that when I was a professor (and when I was a student) you didn't make an appt for office hours -- you just showed up and waited. But now, particularly with the "consumer" model of college, "waiting" is a waste; you "deserve" an appointment.
I agree that ideologically the idea of the appointment for office hours reflects changing ideas of the role of the student. However, adding an appointment structure for office hours is the single best thing that I have ever done for myself in my career. I don’t share my personal calendar with students, but rather use a YouCanBook.Me link that never changes (this is synched to my personal calendar). Doing this reduced my email by a significant percentage. I don’t go rounds with students via email scheduling appointments, if a student from a past semester wants to make an appointment they have the link and critically, they use it. I also find that binding them to a time slot makes them use the time more efficiently. It also means that more students don’t turn up for office hours than I have time to meet with, which was becoming a serious problem! I actually offer more hours per week than I used to because I find each session more manageable.
I'm a new professor and teach a relatively small number of students so I don't have as much of a compare and contrast but I also find allowing students to make an appointment much more efficient for both me and my students. My students are much more likely to show up for a specific appointment than a drop-in office hours slot. They make an appointment (via Calendly) and I know exactly who is coming and what they want to talk about versus when I try to hold drop-in office hours and no one shows up but I spend an hour now working deeply because I think I'm about to be interrupted.
Leading to marking times as busy that aren't meetings, but are just times when I feel like getting something done without having a meeting thrown on top of it.
Indeed! So I guess I'm not performing busy, I am actually busy, but I feel the need to talk about being busy rather than just say I have marked off times in my schedule so I can get things done.
and where faculty have the freedom to question whether even corporate jobs should have this sort of access to our calendars.
at the same time, I suspect that many faculty have no clue that staff cannot opt out of something the university is spending a bunch of money on---or that the university is, in fact, spending a bunch of money to be part of the google system
I'm non-faculty academic staff and I absolutely experience the same thing re: attempts to schedule time with (most) faculty. I joke that the use of Google calendar is one of the dividing lines to know if you're "in academia" or "in higher ed." Staff often operate in a different world of expectations and accountability to others, especially around the usage of our time (and justification of our time, as adjunctification is starting to come for staff positions as well).
Related to this I think, I find it interesting that students are often highly encouraged to use a calendar. There is an explicit acknowledgement even by faculty that calendars are useful and often even required to function in this institution. But since students are kind of in between the faculty and staff, I think they get an odd impression of HOW to use a calendar.
Having moved from academia to NGO world, it became incredibly clear to me how much of the resistance to shared calendering in academia was related to the overt status hierarchy of the academic setting. The time and effort of the back-and-forth-email scheduling process was seen as part of the burden of being junior in the hierarchy. I think it has been, at least subconsciously, a feature and not a bug.
yes.
I want to point out that historically, professors were old white guys, and wonder at how all of this putting the work of scheduling onto others (lower ranking) echos gender, race, and class inequities.
You know it! I’m old enough that I entered academia (grad school 1987-1993) in the early days of transition to personal desktop computers for everyone. There were many old white guys who refused to use computers well through the end of the century, meaning they used secretarial and admin time to type their papers and exams, schedule their travel, and many other tasks. They occupied a disproportionate amount of staff time, while their job definitions and workloads were also increasing. This includes refusal to use email, which means all of this had to be negotiated in person or over the phone.
YOU KNOW IT indeed (also historically, many professors had secretaries!)
When I worked in publishing (1998-2004) the higher-ups proudly and famously did not use email and had their assistants print out their emails, transcribe the (written) responses, and send them back to the author. SUCH a shitty power flex...
This is familiar. I know you’re not exaggerating about 39 emails to schedule one meeting because it’s the same in the university department I worked in for most of my career. Same with people forgetting to attend meetings.
Some folks would show up to regularly scheduled meetings (ie every other Thursday at 3pm) only every third or fourth time, and demand that all discussions and decisions made since they last attended be revisited and rehashed. They were usually accommodated (while I seethed with resentment).
Can confirm that this was similar when I was in the museum world. HR would regularly have to remind staff about limiting reply all usage, and everyone would get distracted enough that we'd end up having meetings in hallways with whomever we could muster.
Chiming in as a staff member at a university. At every university I've worked at, staff are required to use the shared calendar system while faculty can do whatever they want. Whenever I have to schedule a meeting with more than one faculty member, I cry a little first and then wade into a multi-day slog of email just to schedule that one hour.
this feels so familiar. My campus is Outlook not GCal, but basically the same in that non-faculty staff (and, actually, admin who come from faculty) are expected to keep up-to-date digital calendars that are open (busy/free) so others can schedule easily. Faculty have no such expectations. I have to say, as someone who's been on both sides of this, I hate all MS products, but appreciate the convenience of a shared system. I hate feeling like other people can "take" my time, but recognize the efficiency of it. I want to be able to be spontaneous about my time without planning for it, but that seems completely untenable now. Also, I have given over large chunks of my calendar to my students with youcanbook.me, which is another whole essay I don't have time to write. I am forever trying to remember to block off time and make it unavailable for student booking, but also trying to be available for their very real and often also overscheduled needs.
Not necessarily a solution for all, but I'm in a similar situation and have started booking Monday afternoons for my advisees, kind of like office hours for my classes (which i schedule around the course sessions and with the class' input). We've been doing it long enough now that I remember to block the time and my students remember I'll definitely be available.
For me, this is so familiar and so weird at the same time.
Our department uses a shared Outlook calendar. You need a university-issued computer to access it, though. Teaching faculty (aka most of the faculty) don't receive computers, so we're locked out. For me, this is the weird part. In my institution, most of the faculty aren't doing what we want. We're fending for ourselves.
But here's where it gets familiar: When I'm scheduling an appointment, the difference between staff and service-eligible faculty (especially senior faculty) is incredible. Staff use a standardized system, based on their shared calendar. Even though I can't access that calendar, it makes the process so much easier and more flexible. Many service-eligible faculty, on the other hand, use their own apps or systems. So every appointment includes extra portions of labor, confusion and disruption.
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!
This is so dang good, thank you. I also drift into an infinite future but I fill it with bullshit that I also don't want to do but feel like I have to, so maybe I should just try and have a good day today.
Love this response, and this book also changed the way I think about time! I'm trying to remember if it was in this book or somewhere else that a "done list" was suggested? I do that sometimes, create a list of things that I did that day at the end of the day, instead of a "to do list" and I find it comforting when I'm feeling overwhelmed.
This book changed my view of calendars and productivity.
I loved it.
All throughout high school and college, I lived with the false hope of curing my anxiety with a notebook. I initially kept separate notebooks for journaling and bullet journaling/life planning/“what are my life goals” listing, but eventually they morphed together into a jumble of half-filled planner spreads and daily brain dumps. Even now, as I begin my first full time job post-college, I’m trying to keep up with a cute weekly bullet journal that I check maybe twice and feel as if it’s another thing on my to-do list (I’ve actually found daily to-do lists much more helpful than lengthy bullet journals, and it keeps me much more grounded in each day). “I can plan for the future forever” seems to sum up why I’ve kept up with hand-drawn calendars for so long- there’s a hope of easing present anxiety by thinking longingly about an unknown future, and planning productivity into that future will take away the scariness of life right now. Spoiler alert: it does not.
Thanks so much for your post and book rec!
Thank you for the book recommendation, it sounds like something I very much need to read myself. I, too, every year around August and again in December, feel the need for a new planner that will "fix everything."
This resonates so much! On the one hand being planned and efficient can create more space to fit in more than matters. But on the other not if we spend all the time planning so much that we forget to actually do the things...
Yes! My other big takeaway from the book so far is the necessity of either breaking the big things into much, much smaller things (like, is "Move into apartment" one to-do or 70?), or just ignoring some of the smaller things. If I have a big thought project at work, I will put it off for WEEKS by justifying that "I can get these emails done quickly, so THEN I can start without any distractions." Guess what! Distractions ARE FOREVER. So maybe just do the big thing.
SO TRUE! And just with the apartment example: when is it 1? (When it's one of the relatively far off of 500 tasks in the move to grad school project, and I don't even know which city it'll end up being in yet...) vs. When is it 70? (well maybe as it gets much closer to happening is a good time to start breaking down all the actual parts that have to happen to do it!)
Same w/ the big projects thing. Insisting on having a 5 hour time block to get this entire presentation done from start to finish in one sitting is how I'm here 'till 2am every day and exhausted all the time!
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.
As someone who also derives satisfaction in crossing things off lists: what *is* that pleasure in constantly doing? One of the articles I'm reading connects it squarely to Boltanski and Chiapello's thinking about "the new spirit of capitalism" — "to be doing something, to move, to change — that is what enjoys prestige."
I don't know if I can answer your question, but I CAN say that managing ADHD and tedious household tasks is easier if I can cross it off the list and see a progression of accomplishment. If I have to remember 6 things that need doing and get the oomph together to get them all done in the same day? It ain't EVER gonna happen, especially without medication - we take our dopamine fix where we can get it, y'know?
I feel like there's a connection between calendars/to do lists and diet culture but can't quite articulate it. Maybe it's just the constant cultural drive to make yourself over into the image of the ideal (thin/hardworking/busy/organized). The pleasure comes from working toward some sort of perfected future tense. Or maybe it's just that after reading Virginia Sole-Smith's Burnt Toast for a few months, I see diet culture *everywhere* now.
Which is, of course, also connected to white supremacy culture, too (as is diet culture). (See comment above re: white supremacy culture and "timeliness")
Yes, totally. Totally. It's the same pattern right? Consolidate power by dictating a single imaginary ideal and encourage/coerce everyone to believe their job is to conform to the ideal. Is there an academic term or concept for the ways that diet culture, white supremacy, grind culture, etc. all look like tentacles of the same shitty monster? I'm googling but I feel like I don't have the right terms.
I too love crossing off/highlighting what’s complete. It took me awhile and some deconditioning work, but when I started thinking of it as a fluid qualitative ritual rather than a pressured productivity milemarker, that changed the game for me personally. The cross off is for me and me alone. I love the visual transition, the highlighter, the crumpling of paper tossed into the recycling, more satisfying than deleting something from a digital list. It feels more sustainable to easily write out once and then recycle paper than to continually use battery power on devices that I’m constantly retyping words on, although I could be wrong about that.
I was also raised by a compulsive list-maker who wasn’t operating by external pressure, and I watched how making the list is actually “counterproductive.” We could distract ourselves endlessly with list-making to mimic the feeling - and challenge - of actual quality doing/moving/changing (which can also occur without a to-do list). I think a lot of us do this, making lists to feel externally productive because capitalism tells us we should be externally productive. And sometimes we just gotta get them out of our heads to free up some processing ram, ha :-)
Yes - the getting-things-out-of-my-head element of list-making is HUGE for me. There's something about writing something down, externally to me, that really lowers my anxiety because I'm no longer worried that I'm going to forget to do something I want to do!
I love the phrasing of "fluid qualitative ritual" - and you're right that the tactile nature of the writing, the crossing, etc., is part of what make it so satisfying.
I would love to know more about your switch from "pressured productivity milemarker" to "fluid qualitative ritual" if you have the time. It's certainly making me think hard about my to do list right now.
Oh, there’s DEFINITELY some overachiever/perfectionist/productivity culture stuff happening with the list-making and item-crossing-off - I have to be very mindful of not letting that run away with me, and being okay with both 1) not crossing off everything on the list if the day or my personal capacity doesn’t allow for it, and 2) crossing off everything on the list and then letting myself rest, rather than feeling those jitters of “what else can I do? I gotta maximize my use of time!”
And also, there’s something about the *record* of it - having a list with crossed-off teams is also a sort of reminder that I did something, that I am present here, that it would be different if I wasn’t here. I also find that satisfying, and helpful - another part of the productivity stuff for me is that I have to do things to earn my spot, and being able to look at the crossed-off list helps soothes that anxiety a little bit.
Oh this. I still have my physical planners from HS and college and every so often I leaf through them and still get a thrill of accomplishment in looking at all the checked off items…
I find it too hard to keep a journal unless I’m traveling, but I keep track of things that happened or what I’m reading or watching in the notes section on each monthly page of my planner!
Yes! And also I love having the physical reminder of what I was up to, and what was important to me, back then!
Big fan of keeping home/work calendars separate! I also opt to carry the second smartphone provided by work, rather than giving work my personal number and downloading work apps to my personal phone (mail, calendar, zoom, slack). Getting a slack message while I'm at the grocery store is a Sunday-ruining occurrence in my books.
YES - I had the option to have a separate work phone at my last job, and that arrangement worked super well for me, but my current job doesn’t offer that option. So far, having the work apps on my phone, but with notifications turned off, has worked to keep those boundaries up.
If you have an iPhone, the new context-specific focuses in iOS 16 are really helpful for separating things out. I have a work focus and a rest focus (and sleep end mornings foci) and they have different Home Screens and different notifications allowed and time of day or location triggers to make them toggle automatically. It helps with differentiating between work and not-work in a single phone.
I didn't even think about this! Brilliant.
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 have read on a couple different substacks now about the horrors that are sports scheduling apps. There are so many, none of them as functional as they would ideally be.
Right there with you. Three kids on three soccer teams within the same organization should lead to streamlined scheduling...instead it leads to me making a spreadsheet. Three separate apps, none of them good, and then you need to layer on the snack schedules from SignUp Genius, my text strings on carpools, etc. That's before we ever get to the spousal responsibility negotiation.
And to think, people used to sign up for snacks by passing around a physical calendar and putting your name on it
I just wanted to tell you that as a mom, and a primary care doctor, I totally hear you! I used to have to manually bypass the scheduling system to see siblings at the same time, it was insane to me because it was easier for everyone if I did it that way but it took an extraordinary amount of effort to make it happen! Also, I have this pipe dream (as a mom) that each of my 3 kids will have a twice yearly "appointment day" and on that day we will take the day off of school and work to do all of their things - dentist, primary care doctor/sports physical, eye doctor, clothing and physical needs, etc. But I've tried and there is so much rescheduling that I can't make it work. (sigh)
Omg, bless all you do for your kids and your community! Please know that my frustration is not at our providers or the lovely schedulers. We know y’all work so hard and are also frustrated by the portals. (It’s been four years and two additional pregnancies /deliveries and My ob team cannot get mychart to remove the “C-section” listed on my medical summary.)
Appt day sounds lovely, can we get a barber/hair stylist involved? It would be so nice to just get it all taken care of at once like that scene in Miss Congeniality!
Yes! I have yet to schedule my kids' flu shots or COVID boosters because I have to call - they can see all three kids at once, but the web scheduler doesn't do that.
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 makes total sense.
I find this so interesting. As a fellow healthcare worker (hospital RN), I also have a dynamic work schedule -- but I didn’t use a calendar until I had kids and needed a way to externalize schedule stuff with my spouse. Your work is hard and I gotta say I envy your ability to truly CLOCK OUT on your days off!!
Oh yeah, I know that not having children truly allows me to live without the external calendar. After working in the ER through covid, that’s when I made it a personal mission to “clock out” after work. It was difficult but I wanted to minimize the stress that I brought home with me.
Godspeed fellow healthcare worker! You’ve got a hard job too.
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 love that you bring up this very real tension: there's something to be gained by orienting life outside the "work" calendar, but also, particularly for clergy I've interviewed about burnout, there's a real exhaustion, too, that accumulates around whatever their faith understandings as the "high" holidays, which also prevents them from experiencing the contemplation that is deemed essential during this time
I am trying to reorient myself to the jewish calendar. Since I'm not a religious professional there are maaaany clashes with capitalism. I started a job this year the day after Tisha b'Av, a fast day which, I'm always wrecked the day after I fast, so I decided not to fast. To be clear I believe strongly that you can choose not to fast for ANY reasons and all choices are equally valid, but I really hated that I was making the choice to prioritize my work life over my spiritual life in that moment. Since my calendar does not align with the Christian calendar that dominates American life there are many, many times where I feel like I'm basically being enforced to observe someone else's religion.
Also: I lived in Southeast Asia for a few years, and the polychromic approach to time there helped me begin to value relationships over efficiency. For instance, when I'd go to the post office in our small town, it was culturally appropriate to make small talk with the postal worker for a while, maybe even have tea, before asking for postage.
I'm non-religious but really appreciate the way you've discussed this. I'm inspired by your approach to think about alternative ways to think about the year, and imagine I will find a similar feeling in the natural (e.g. the solstice). Thank you for this prompt.
I'm worship and work at an Episcopal church. We returned to liturgical worship several years ago because we missed the rhythms of the church calendar - the extended periods during lent and advent to slow down, examine our lives, and recalibrate. Working there (in a non-clergy role), however, had made Advent and Holy Week more busy, which I'm conflicted about. I accept that it's part of the job, but I miss having time to be contemplative.
I'm not religious at all, but it's funny, I live in New England now after growing up and spending most of my life in places with less seasonal variation. The changing of the seasons here gives me the same feeling of time as a spiral vs. a straight line - it's a lot to get used to at first, but every time winter comes around again I'm a little more ready for it.
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!
"A shared calendar is absolutely essential for getting through my day without letting anyone down." I really relate to the fear of letting people down. I am conscientious to a fault when I am able to be and yet I also suffer from chronic debilitating headaches. There are many many days when I am just not able to do all the things I wanted and promised to do. It's so, so frustrating. And no calendar can fix it. I am working on being okay with letting people down. It's hard. It's made me think a lot about all the other things my calendar and my planner can't fix. Like that there are just way too many things to do every single day and I am not a robot.
As a late-diagnosed ADHD'er myself, I have found the Bullet Journal Method to be a huge boon in keeping my sh*t together (or at least portraying the appearance of someone who has their sh*t mostly together). We have a shared household calendar, and my work life is ruled by Outlook, but my bullet journal is the single source of truth for me.
For some, the constant migration from future log to monthly spread to weekly spread can get repetitive, but for me it is essential in being able to effectively plan my days, weeks, and months. And as someone who struggles with executive functioning, being able to cross things off is immensely satisfying and motivating.
It's not an exaggeration to say that bullet journaling has made me a better and more reliable partner, friend, sister, and employee. I often have to refer back to Ryder's book to refresh myself on the "why" from time to time, but when I do I am more mindful, deliberate, and grateful.
Big bullet journal fan over here! I keep one for personal, and one for work. At work I think it's the best way to bring together all the digital to dos (calendar invites, emails, slack messages, verbal requests) and my own goals and priorities without having to fuss over digital format on an app. It's so easy to just write everything in one place and it's faster than adding to a digital list imo. It's also great because at the end of the day, you flip the page! That feeling of a fresh start is so conducive to switching my work brain off for the day.
That would be nice. Since I started working remotely 9 days out of 10, it's increasingly difficult to maintain boundaries between work and life. And I love my job! Keeping one journal instead of two probably doesn't help with that separation. But I LONG for the feeling of being an integrated whole person, instead of two people competing with each other for one person's time.
Absolutely, I totally get that. I once attended a talk by a high-powered woman in my industry who refused to have her assistant maintain a separate calendar. She said, "I'm one person so I have one calendar! My kids' dance recital is on the calendar next to the board meeting." I admire that drive to put equal weight on priorities at home and I fully appreciate the longing to feel like you're a single, fully integrated person.
The main reason why I keep two separate bujos now is that I am actively trying to separate my identity from my job title. The culture I'm in makes it so easy to conflate my success at work with my worth as a person. When I was having a bad day at work it would affect my life at home, so I recognized the need to distance myself and set better boundaries about a year ago. My strategy is pretty generic and includes setting physical boundaries (separate room at home for my desk, separate bujo, separate calendar), and setting time boundaries (leave by 5:30 PM every day). I'm still trying to get it right, and I probably will be trying for the rest of my career.
Another difference between us! I actually identify quite strongly with my job, which is basically software engineering. So I don't mind that overlap, just so long as I have the time to be here for the people I need to.
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 feel this idea of a digital accounting/reminders about your day being creepy. There is something vaguely dystopian about the reminders I get from Google about, say, a dance class I'm taking. Very Black Mirror somehow, to me.
I think this is why I like relying on the paper planner — it relieves that executive function stress but also doesn't remind me (or become visible to others)
Yep! 100% Yep! For such a long time I felt like having a calendar I lived by would make me no fun at all... But now it's finally hitting me that without some degree of advanced planning it's just exponentially harder to make everything fit. And fun things can go on the calendar too! Just having (some of) them occur at a time I previously thought might be a good plan doesn't make inherently fun things less fun!
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 felt this feeling about importance, professionally. For me, it's linked to a looming sense of imposter syndrome, and I often have to fight that impulse when it appears.
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 love this piece very much.
Thanks for sharing, this link is great! Love the idea of personal "phases", and thanks for the indirect inspiration to look up a local to me in season veggies chart!
Routines are so important with little kids. We, also, do the same things every day, but not at the same times. I love the idea of creating a kind of "mood board" for remembering dates/events, and I am slowly realizing that I sort of do that with my google photo and what memes from the internet I save at that time, haha. I should make that more formal, see how it feels.
I do navigate time by the vegetables coming in season too!
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.
I send invites from my personal calendar to my work calendar.
I struggled with this for years - outlook for work, Google for personal. Discovered an app called Calendar Bridge. It's $5 a month, but well worth it for the stress it relieves me by actually syncing the two.
Whoa that might change my life. Thank you!
There’s a way to create a url link from the online outlook calendar that you can import in google calendar. It’s not perfect and doesn’t update super frequently but it’s better than toggling back and forth.
I was very frustrated with this, but then I realized I could import them both into my iphone calendar so I had one calendar with everything...and otherwise leave them separate, which really helped with keeping work and life separate (this was when I had a 9-5 job for the first time in decades, which was also my first outlook experience in decades and man did I hate it) (I always have worked fulltime, just not 9-5).