Don’t Be Fooled by Your Calendar
365 days. 52 weeks. 12 months. All of these add up to a calendar year in one form or another. But listen to these wise words from Charles Dow Richards, a famed Canadian politician:
“Don’t be fooled by the calendar. There are only as many days in the year as you make use of.”
We tend to focus on the calendar in very constrained terms. We identify its length by the year we’re in — not the year gone by or the year to come. We often cram a bunch of our tasks, projects, and ideas into the early stages of the calendar year and once we realize we haven’t hit the mark on some of them we do the same for the tail end of the year.
Stop that.
When you try to cram things in, you don’t think big. You think small.
You think about how much you can fit in. Further to that, you try to figure out how you can fit things into an increasingly smaller space.
Stop that. Seriously.
For example, if you “hyperschedule” yourself by filling every single time block on your calendar then if something doesn’t happen according to what the calendar indicates (which happens with things that are largely out of your control) then your stress levels will climb. Things like getting sick (which happened to me yesterday) or an emergency meeting or client call can really throw you off your game.
If you’ve followed my work for a while you know that I don’t advocate blocking off every minute of the day with any sort of detail. Instead, I theme my days so that each day has an overarching focus. So in essence I do use my calendar as a driving force for my day.
Each daily theme acts as a trigger so when I don’t have anything specific scheduled in a time slot I can quickly choose what task I need or want to work on next. I simply think about the day of the week and then work on whatever tasks that align with that day’s theme.
If you want to avoid being fooled by your calendar, give it a role that it is better suited to handle. Time theming is one of the way that your calendar can give you guidance rather than giving you hard and fast rules that have little to no flexibility.
Your year can start anytime you want to let it. You just have to be able to look beyond the numbers — the quantification — and look toward something else: the quality of what you do with those numbers. Your calendar habits are a critical component of task and time management. When your calendar is out of control — or too heavily controlled — you can be hurting your long-term productivity rather than helping it.
If you start using your calendar better now, you’ll find that your calendar will start helping you move forward every single day.
