Creating a Reliable Calendar

One of the simplest pieces of advice from the Simplified Organization E-Course is to create a reliable calendar.  The calendar is not a place for wishful thinking and far off plans.  It’s not where the neverending to-list goes.  It’s a container.  It holds some things, not everything.

Calendars work best when they outside obligations–appointments where we need to be out of the house or someone is coming to our house.  I’ve also started including firm work deadlines.  It helps me shape the rest of the week when I can make space for work demands instead trying to fit them in around the edges.

In this season of life, we don’t have an overwhelming number of outside activities. We aren’t tracking multiple schedules.  Still, de-cluttering the calendar has made it a more helpful tool.  In the past our appointments tended to get lost in the extraneous things I added.  These were things I wanted to do, but that could easily happen on any day instead of on a specific day.

Without that visual and mental clutter, I can see the hard lines of the day and know how to shape the more flexible pieces.  With lots of margin and a little luck, our days are finding their rhythm.