The Calendar is Our Friend

Planning to do something and actually setting aside the time and doing it are two different things. They’re related but distinctly different. I’ve been planning to visit the town where I grew up for a very long time now. But I can’t seem to save up the money, put it on the calendar and do it. I’ve had some degree of luck with my writing but that’s because I’ve either set up a daily goal or I’ve had external deadlines imposed upon me.

It’s high time that I learned to set goals and place deadlines on myself. It is a lot easier when you have someone else to do it for you but in the final analysis, how you spend your time and what you accomplish are up to you. I’ve spent way too much of my life working for someone else and letting them set the schedule for me.

To that end I’ve started shopping around for software, preferably free, to help me correlate my schedule with my goals. The procrastinator in me thinks I should write it myself so it meets all of my requirements. The pragmatist in me knows that will never work. Without some kind of scheduling tool, imperfect though it may be, a project of that magnitude would never get off the ground.

I’ve spent some time Googling the topic. I’ve read some articles in Wikipedia. I even noticed that my favorite database app, Airtable, was talking about how it added support for Calendars. When I looked for it in the iPhone version, it wasn’t apparent. That makes me think that you’ve got to set up the Calendar view with the web browser version of the app. You may even have to use that version to consult the calendar. I suspect the iPad version of the app may support the Calendar view as well. It does have more screen real estate to work with.

Back to the point. I don’t care if I have to go to a stationary store and buy me a paper calendar, I need to get my writing schedule down where I can look at it, compare how I’m doing to what I planned, and replan based on what I’ve learned. This as true of my musical aspirations and my programming projects, not to mention my ham radio activities, as it is my writing.

So, what I want to know is how come it has taken me sixty two years to figure this out? What might I have accomplished if I had started using a calendar in my teens? Why isn’t this part of the public school curriculum? What can I do to help change this? I definitely have some thinking to do.


Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.