November 7, 2025

My Calendar From Last Week

Fellow list member Linas Vadeika wrote in to ask a question about calendar management (shared with permission):

Dear Jonathan,

Thank you for sharing. Your content is really useful.

These series on “task management” got me interested in “calendar management” (incl. monthly / weekly / daily planning, time-blocking, “change-of-plans” re-scheduling, apps you use). Maybe you could cover that next?

Sorry if you have already covered that previously - I joined only recently.

Best Regards,

Linas

Thanks for asking, Linas!

Here’s a screenshot of my calendar from last week:

First, some notes:

I blurred out people’s names to protect the guilty ;-)
Most of my weeks look more or less like this screenshot (in terms of number of appointments, not the specific appointments).
The red events are from a public calendar I subscribe to that shows US Holidays.
Every other color (i.e., green, yellow, and purple) is from my global “Appointments” calendar.
Normally, the events I put in my Appointments calendar are all just green, but I color-coded them for the screenshot to make it easier to discuss.
The yellow events are personal (e.g., Maggie to Dentist).
The green events are what I would consider “client work”.
The purple event is a podcast recording (IMHO, podcast interviews are somewhere between work and personal).
All of the events in my Appointments calendar represent a meeting between me and one or more other people, so I can’t easily move them.
Exception to previous point: I do add dependent blocks before or after appointments where necessary (e.g., “In Car” before “Karate”).
Some events recur twice a week (e.g., Gym), some recur every other week (e.g., Ditcherville LIVE), some are one-offs (e.g., Maggie to Dentist). I’d like it if this were expressed in the UI, but alas, it’s not.
My wife sometimes has appointments that I want to be aware of but I am not involved in (e.g., taking herself to the dentist). I keep these in a separate calendar so they do not prevent people from booking appointments with me via my scheduling app (which happens to be Calendly, but there are a bunch of good ones).
Ideally, my wife would keep her own calendar that I could subscribe to, but I haven’t got the political capital it would require to make that happen ;-)

Okay, now onto a few of the things Linas was wondering about:

monthly / weekly / daily planning

I don’t use my calendar for planning. It’s for keeping track of appointments I have with other people.

time-blocking

I do two kinds of time blocking:

As mentioned above, I sometimes block out dependencies around a true appointment for things like drive time or post-processing that has to be done immediately.
When I want a time block to myself (usually a full day), I block it out. I typically do this for the week on Sunday or Monday, if I do it at all. For example, I might have a Tuesday with a bunch of calls, so I’ll block out all day Wednesday because I don’t want to feel drained from too many calls.

“change-of-plans” re-scheduling

This is managed through my scheduling app. It’s not managed in my calendar.

apps you use

Google Calendar and Calendly.

Hope that helps!

Yours,

—J