Save the date

How tying your calendars together can give you a better map of your work

Blunders, in all their frustrating,  chaotic forms, often leave us with a need to sink into a hole where shame and embarrassment can’t reach us. At their worst, they’ll drag you back into your most humiliating moments when you’d rather be catching some much-needed z’s. If you’re lucky, though, a blunder might just stumble its way into a nugget of wisdom you can use to make your life a little better—and avoid another catastrophe along the way.

When I started college, I decided to stop taking my ADHD medication after being worn down by several years of trial-and-error with various types of treatment. I never liked the unreliability and shakiness that my untreated ADHD wrought upon me, but at least I understood it, and I wanted to see if I could manage things on my own.

Turns out, winging it and keeping sticky notes in your head of everything you need to get done doesn’t work very well, and I barely skated by my first few years.  But things panned out mostly fine and my teachers were usually accommodating when I started to struggle.

Everyone except Professor Thatcher¹, who’d either mistaken me for a nonexistent student named Jason all semester, or her vendetta ran deep enough to deliberately butcher my name at every turn. Admittedly, her disdain probably stemmed from my typically aloof and forgetful nature that often left me a bit behind in the class—fair. Still, this unaddressed beef nearly docked me a full letter grade; an A was rare for me at that point, and I wasn’t going to lose it without a fight.

As most professors did, Thatcher* would hand back our stories after grading them, complete with any feedback she’d opted to toss in. A few weeks before graduation, she handed us all manila folders and asked us to resubmit our graded assignments so she could enter them into a spreadsheet and finalize our grades.

Fully aware of my chronic disorganization at the time, I don’t want to be too harsh on Thatcher* for that slip-up, but I did my part and submitted all my assignments. Something got lost along the way, though, as a few days later I got an email from her asking why I hadn’t turned in my papers. One tense back-and-forth later, I sent an email with every assignment we’d done in the class, along with the grade I received.

Thankfully, I’d kept a spreadsheet of all my grades throughout the years to avoid a second stint in academic probation. In theory, this seemingly fool-proof evidence should’ve gotten things squared away. Instead, as I stood in line to pick up my cap and gown, I received the following email:

“Wow, Jordan, I wish you’d put this much effort in into your actual work”

Again, I get it; I could have done more to combat my apparent carelessness and show that I was genuinely trying. The work spoke for itself, though, even if it had gotten lost in Thatcher’s* stacks of last-minute story drafts and end-of-semester well wishes.

I didn’t start the spreadsheet as a failsafe against petty professors, but the receipts came in handy. Without them, I’d probably have accepted defeat and taken the hit to my barely-recovered GPA, but sometimes a CYA policy truly pulls through. Since then, I’ve tried to keep as much of a log as possible of the big things at work to make sure that nothing slips through the cracks, and that when it does, it’s easy to see what went wrong and what to do going forward.

Per my last note

Tracking things at work like meeting notes and the status of various tasks and projects isn’t as easy as keeping a two-column spreadsheet of all your grades, but it’s still worth doing. If you ever have to cover your ass in case of a miscommunication, it can be difficult without having something to show for it.

This doesn’t mean you should keep track of everything, but there’s value in harnessing the vast amount of tools we have in order to  keep things on the rails at work Increasingly, I’ve found that calendars—in all their various shapes and sizes—can be a useful way to make sense of what’s happening at work, and how things all come together.

Take, for instance, my favorite note taking app as of late: Craft. It’s a block-based notes app similar to Notion that focuses on design and connecting notes. The developers recently dropped a new version that adds a Daily Notes function, which allows you to create a note that’s associated with that day’s date and lives forever in a dedicated calendar—available again with one click. I use it to keep track of what my boss and I talk about in meetings so I know what needs to happen next, as well as other tidbits of information like what I’m working on,  handy tips a colleague gives me, or links that I found useful in getting through the day.

A lot of that stuff ends up in a virtual pile of things I never need to see again, but it’s nice to know that it’s all there just in case I need to refer back. 

Remember the time?

Sometimes it’s hard to remember the exact date you spoke about a particular problem, though, so those notes won’t be of much use if you don’t know how to sift through them. Most note-taking apps with Daily Notes support have built-in search (and if it doesn’t, you should probably find a better app), but adding a Journal Calendar to the Google Calendar you probably already use can make it easier to hunt down noteworthy events.

I heard of calendar journaling through Merlin Mann’s various podcasts (links down at the bottom), but here’s the gist: you can hide and show calendars in Google Calendar at will, so why not make it the most powerful map of your time possible? If your primary calendar is a map of where your time is going, the Journal would be a map of where you’ve been, with an easy way to spot trends and shifts over time. Some useful instances might be the day your child says their first words, or the last time your dogs got a flea treatment. At work, a calendar journal might be filled with things like the number of times you’ve asked for a raise/promotion, each instance your boss asked you to do things outside your scope of work, or even just times where a work pal came in to save the day when you needed them.

Paired together with a thorough usage of Daily Notes (plus some time tracking, if you so choose), and you can gather some pretty insightful conclusions from everything you’ve collected. If you’re not sure of when the last time was that you regrouped with your team about a particular project, you could hunt that down in your notes and refresh yourself on what you talked about. Or, if you’re trying to keep track of every time a coworker has given you trouble, mark them on your journal calendar (then keep it hidden so you’re not constantly reminded).

You could even tie your to-do list into this, too, if you use an app like Things 3 or Todoist, both of which provide logs of the tasks you’ve completed on a given day. Let’s say you’re going through a performance review, and there’s a discrepancy on how much you’ve actually gotten done. The more thorough your log, the easier it is to let your work speak for itself. In Things 3, you can even search through your logbook to find out when you completed a specific task if it comes up later. Even if it doesn’t, it’s nice to have a way to assure yourself you’re actually doing the work—even if that little voice in your head says maybe you’re not.

📚 Good Reads:

Bring back menus! (Slate): The best menus offer a glimpse into the character of a restaurant, and tell you exactly what you’re going to get in a mouth-watering tone without selling you short. On the other hand, a bad menu can be clunky to navigate, unclear in its descriptions, or simply sticky and gross with the residue of diners past. That last one’s mostly not an issue now, with many restaurants moving to digital menus in the wake of the pandemic, but the QR code-centric model has brought new problems along with it. Sure, it’s convenient if you’ve got a phone handy and the website’s designed well enough, but as Christina Cauterucci notes that’s not always the case, and it’s hard not to be nostalgic for a nice looking paper menu sometimes.

The pop star versus the playlist (Vox): There’s a lot of power in the playlist: the right streak of songs can get you out of your worst ruts, amp you up before your next workout, or just make a slog of a shift go by a little bit faster. Great as all these algorithmically and expert-curated playlists can be, they haven’t been entirely harmless. Charlie Harding goes in-depth on the ways playlists prioritize tracks over the talent behind them, and the struggles artists have in building relationships with fans in the streaming world.

Meetings. Why? (The New York Times): Dread them. Run from them. Meetings arrive all the same. Caity Weaver looks back on the history of meetings—back to George Washington’s hatred and ultimate acceptance of them—and goes into the various ways they’ve been utilized over the years. After a brief look over how meetings can serve as a way to extract more from workers, Weaver provides some tips on how to know what constitutes a meeting and how to make your next one better.

🌐 Just Browsing:

🏃🏼‍♂️ What makes speedrunning games so fun? 🔎 Mozilla published a study on YouTube’s algorithm. Here’s what they found. 👩🏼‍⚖️ How much do App Store rules matter? 👨🏼‍💻 What did remote work look like before computers? 🐭 A deep dive into Disney Adults 🗑 America has a food waste problem 💰 On being more financially transparent with friends. 🗓️ Why unlimited vacation days are a scam. ♨️ We’re all burnt out. Here’s what you can do about it. 🥶 Before you blast that A/C this summer, some things to consider. 📅 What deadlines do to lifetimes. 🛒 How products go viral on TikTok

🔧 Toolkit:

• An episode of Slate’s How To podcast discussing how to stand up to your boss without getting fired. Also check out their episode on fighting outrageous medical bills.

• A better way to organize your to-do list app.

• Creating a digital homemaker’s binder in Google Calendar.

• Using Google Calendar as a personal journal.

• The Back to Work podcast’s series of episodes on calendars is worth a listen to, if you want to get into the nitty gritty of it all. Here are the first, second, and third episodes in the series.

💕 And now, here’s something we hope you’ll really like:

We just watched Fast 9, and it’s just as wild and ridiculous as you could hope for in the summer’s best family flick. I don’t have a copy of it for you to watch, unfortunately, but I do have this absolutely delightful old video of Vin Diesel giving demos of old Street Shark toys. Stay for the ending, trust me. 

As always, if you have any questions, feedback, or just want to say hello, feel free to drop me a line on Twitter.

My thanks to Medea Giordano* for editing this issue.

1. The names in this story have been changed, because, frankly, I hope they have too.