Keep Only One Calendar

I first got into the habit of using a calendar when I was in high school. I was editor of the school newspaper and I needed something to help me keep track of my interview appointments. So I went out and bought an undated weekly calendar from the local drug store. I quickly started filling it with all sorts of things of interest to a teenager, and I enjoyed looking over the pages at the end of each week to see how much I had accomplished.

That habit carried over into college, where I used the calendars they sold in the school bookstore that had the university crest on the cover. I could look over a week at a time, and instantly know what I needed to do from day to day. I thought I was pretty organized. Not only did I usually show up to classes and events on time (my 7:25 am Brit Lit 1 course not withstanding), but I normally showed up relatively prepared, too. Sure, I pulled the occasional all-nighter as all college students do, but on the whole things seemed under control.

Then I hit the professional world and I stumbled across Franklin Planners. Something prodded me to buy a taped FranklinQuest time management seminar. I listened to those tapes many times over the years, until I had whole sections of the course memorized. Finally, I had discovered that I was not alone in my obsession with calendars! The planner that sat before me was the mother of all calendars. I took it everywhere. I was hooked.

On those tapes, Hyrum Smith, the founder of the Franklin Quest company himself, exhorted me to "keep only one calendar", and I thought but of course. If you keep more than one calendar, you risk double-booking, or missing appointments. I'd never had a problem with this -- I only ever had access to one calendar at a time.

But today it's not so easy. I traded in my bulky planner for a series of Palms (I could wax poetic on my Treo, but I'll save that for a later post). Then my PowerBook came with Calendar and Address Book. Then my office started requiring us all to use the calendaring portion of Lotus Notes. My free email addresses from Yahoo and Google? They came with calendars, too. And now that I'm married, there's my husband's calendar to synchronize with. Things were never this complicated in college.

The only problem I've managed to solve, more or less, is the Lotus Notes problem. I know that from 8 am to 5 pm Monday through Friday, I'm generally at work. So I sign out those hours from my Treo and schedule future office meetings with Lotus Notes. Then each morning I put that day's appointments into my Treo and let the Treo's alarms keep me on schedule throughout the day. The system works pretty well. I only have to worry about the occasional day when I'm not in the office, and those dates are relatively easy to keep synchronized.

I'm still fascinated by other calendars, electronic and paper alike, and I continue to play with them whenever I get the chance. Each one has its own personality, its own feature set. But when I'm playing with those other calendars, life is difficult. I never know where a piece of information is stored, I miss appointments, or I double-book, just as Hyrum warned me. So I keep coming back to my Treo. It's what I'm used to, and it works.

The biggest thing I haven't resolved yet is the problem of keeping my calendar synchronized with my husband's. When things get crazy I try to sit down with him and make sure we're on the same page, but we still end up booking each other for mystery events every once-in-a-while. We've played with several systems that should let us see each others' schedules, but none have met all our requirements yet.

My calendar system is still a work in progress, and probably always will be. It's not perfect; I'm still struggling with learning to say "no" when my plate is full, but aren't we all?