To Calendar Or Not To Calendar?

How do you know where you are supposed to be and when?

What helps you remember birthdays, anniversaries, team schedules and travel plans?

Do you use a calendar or do you just hope your brain remembers?

One of the things I notice with my coaching clients is that they don’t necessarily use a calendar, paper or digital, to keep up with their schedules. Some of them have “planners” but they are sporadic in updating and/or referring to it. As time goes on, I am less shocked than I used to be when I hear someone saying they don’t use a calendar, but I am no less curious about how they function without one.

I should confess that I am a calendar lover! I don’t remember when I saw and understood my first one but I know that I love few things more than a fresh calendar with numbered blocks representing days, weeks and years. I love checking and double-checking my calendar to see what’s coming up, not to mention I love having the record of what has already happened. For years, my mother used her calendar as a journal, of sorts, and I think her practice has informed my thoughts about a calendar being more than blocks and lines and numbers. I won’t go so far as to say that my calendar is sacred but I will say that I don’t take my calendar, and what it represents, lightly. If I write something in my calendar, it’s a symbol of the commitment I am making to be at that place at the time. It’s a reminder of the responsibility I have to a job I said I would do. It’s a rhythm of my days that marks my time on this earth.

So, with that bit of insight into my feelings about calendars, I hope you can see why I find it interesting, if not surprising, that so many people, especially younger people, don’t use one. I don’t know if I could operate without one! Not only that, I still use a paper calendar. I also use a digital calendar for scheduling clients so that makes multiple calendars that I interact with every day. How can some people not even have one?

One of the things that my clients ask for help with is time-management and, more and more, it makes sense that people would struggle with this area when they have not had the practice of visualizing hours, days, weeks, months and years while writing things on a paper calendar. For all the years I have used a paper calendar, I never consciously thought about how that activity was helping to create an invisible timeline in my mind and how that timeline helped me develop time-management skills.

One of the first things I do with my clients is talk through their schedule–what do they do every day? what do they do every week? every month? As they talk, we make a list of everything they mention. Then, I have them write all of those things on a paper calendar. When I am working with students, they include all their test & assignment dates, project & paper deadlines, etc. Finally, they include their work hours, gym sessions, social activities, etc. For the ones that have never used a paper calendar, seeing all the things written down in front of them is a game changer. They can see, maybe for the first time, a visual representation of how their hours, days, weeks, and months are connected. Something in their brain clicks and they start to see time differently. They begin to be aware of a bigger picture than what they can see on the small screen of a phone. And, they either see a schedule with some gaps or they don’t have enough room to fit everything. Whether they know it or not, what they see when they put their schedule on paper sends a message about how they should approach managing their time.

I am, in no way, against technology! But I do believe that, just because something can be accomplished on a phone, tablet or computer, doesn’t mean that it’s the best way to do it. I’ve tried to convert to a digital calendar and it just doesn’t work for me. So, while I’ll concede that a digital calendar is better than no calendar, I’ll stick with my paper version. I just hope there never comes a day when they stop printing them!