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Over the years of working as a software engineer at companies of various sizes, and now working full-time on my business for over a year, I've gained considerable experience with modern calendaring.
During that time, I've noticed flaws in my system and others, which I've resolved over time through small, meaningful changes.
In this blog post, I'm going to discuss some of those problems and how I use a few Japanese philosophies as guidelines to design schedules that are calm and serve my goals better.
Let's start with:
The problems with modern schedules
Our schedules have become too congested, and it might not entirely be our fault.
Packed schedules are a badge of honour in modern work, and having a calendar decorated with back-to-back events makes us “feel productive”, but often at the expense of making any substantial progress.
Here's where an overscheduled and unbalanced calendar falls apart:
- It’s fragile. When events or tasks are scheduled without any free time in between, the entire calendar becomes susceptible to disruption. A minor delay in one task or event can cascade the delay to successive events. There's no room to accommodate any extra time.
- It overwhelms us. Machines are great at switching context and progressing from one task to another in milliseconds. We humans, not so much. Regardless of how productive we consider ourselves, we need the time and space to take a breath, catch up with what's happening around us and then progress to what's next. A packed calendar deprives us of this opportunity and is often overwhelming to deal with.
- It disrupts our lives outside work. An overscheduled work calendar doesn't leave much room for things outside our work, such as health, hobbies and relationships. Days fly by, jumping from meeting to meeting and between other events.
- There’s hardly any room for growth. The world around us is ever-changing, and staying relevant in this world means making time for learning new skills and sharpening existing ones. This is seldom possible with a packed calendar because we neither have the time nor the energy to learn anything outside of our day-to-day work.
To address these problems, we need to step back from piling events on our calendar and visualise a well-balanced schedule that not only gives us space to slow down when needed but also helps us grow.
The Japanese philosophies we'll be discussing in this article will serve as a construct, or rather a stencil, that you can use to design a framework that helps you schedule events on your calendar more mindfully.
