That’s actually not a bad idea. I think I’ll adopt it. Easy enough to do with iCal or Google Calendar.
You might find it informative to know that personal-productivity guru David Allen advises against putting on one’s calendar anything that will not “die” if you do not get to it that day.
The note I made went into a file that I will review July 2010. (I make such a file for every 3-month period coming up.)
So… you keep some of your calendar events in files by month, in order to get around a self-imposed limitation on another part of your calendar, which part you call “my calendar”?
Hi Randall Randall! If you and I were to arrange to meet the first Wednesday after the holidays, I would put a few words about the meeting in my calendar. Do you really want my calendar to be cluttered up with “nice to have” and “we should re-read this sometime” reminders? Aren’t you a little worried that the reminder of our meeting will get lost in the noise, and I will neglect to go?
And if you aren’t worried because you know that if I do not show then I’ll never see my leather jacket again, or whatever, then I would be worried. And I do not like to worry: I want to know that whatever reminder I put in my calendar will definitely be seen by me on the day I intended for me to see it. And that means never putting so many things on my calendar that I start to regret consulting it. In fact, sometimes a whole month goes by in which there are zero words and zero marks in my calendar for the whole month (but then I lead an unusually unstructured life).
That file named July 2010? Well, first, there is no file named June 2010 or May 2010: there is only one for every 3 months. Moreover, past experience suggests that I probably will not get around to looking in there till September or December.
Thanks for writing this, Eliezer.
I consider it so informative I wrote a note to myself to re-read it in 6 months.
That’s actually not a bad idea. I think I’ll adopt it. Easy enough to do with iCal or Google Calendar.
There’s software (such as the open-source Mnemosyne) which works by exactly this kind of staged review, in a more sophisticated form.
You might find it informative to know that personal-productivity guru David Allen advises against putting on one’s calendar anything that will not “die” if you do not get to it that day.
The note I made went into a file that I will review July 2010. (I make such a file for every 3-month period coming up.)
So… you keep some of your calendar events in files by month, in order to get around a self-imposed limitation on another part of your calendar, which part you call “my calendar”?
Hi Randall Randall! If you and I were to arrange to meet the first Wednesday after the holidays, I would put a few words about the meeting in my calendar. Do you really want my calendar to be cluttered up with “nice to have” and “we should re-read this sometime” reminders? Aren’t you a little worried that the reminder of our meeting will get lost in the noise, and I will neglect to go?
And if you aren’t worried because you know that if I do not show then I’ll never see my leather jacket again, or whatever, then I would be worried. And I do not like to worry: I want to know that whatever reminder I put in my calendar will definitely be seen by me on the day I intended for me to see it. And that means never putting so many things on my calendar that I start to regret consulting it. In fact, sometimes a whole month goes by in which there are zero words and zero marks in my calendar for the whole month (but then I lead an unusually unstructured life).
That file named July 2010? Well, first, there is no file named June 2010 or May 2010: there is only one for every 3 months. Moreover, past experience suggests that I probably will not get around to looking in there till September or December.