What my calendar looks like

Free, clear, and calm

Whenever I’m at a coffee shop, and I walk by people with their laptops open to their calendar, I’ll often see something like this:

Or this…

Or a game of calendar Tetris like this…

What?? I can’t identify with this level of busy.

Here’s my actual calendar for January and the first couple weeks of February, 2017:

I always leave Monday’s open, and only pop something on there that’s casual or spontaneous. Like today I’m going to over to a friend’s office to check out their new space.

Fridays are for nothing, too. That way if something has to happen that week for sure, I can always pop it on Friday.

And other than that, maybe one or two things on a given day. Mostly nothing. Mostly open so I can make decisions about my day that day, not days or weeks before. This lets me make the best use of my time when I know how I want to use that time. When’s that? At that exact moment.

I don’t want to say no to something that comes up today at 2:30 because I agreed to something 3 weeks ago at 2:30. Yes, occasionally that happens, but I want to design that situation to be an outlier rather than the norm.

What do I do with all that empty space? My job! I design, I write, I think, I work!

I know some people love being appointment-busy and scheduling everything out precisely — that’s just not me, and never has been. Different strokes for different folks for sure.