Last week, I promised you I’d explain how I’m calendaring out my year. This goes beyond just putting things on my to-do list and expands to also include goal-setting: weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually.
Just like last year’s calendaring shenanigans, I’m conquering this with a little (actually, a lot of) help from my 2022 Ink + Volt day planner, with which I have a love-hate relationship.
If the subject of my Substack today calls to you and you are reading this, please know upfront that I am not doing any kind of paid (or unpaid, for that matter) endorsement of Ink + Volt, and I also am sharing my story from a place of curiosity (my 2022 power word!) and humility, since last year, things did not end well for me and Ink + Volt (let’s just call it “IV” for today).
Me & IV: A damaged love story
When I started my newsletter last year, it was because I wanted to commence an epic “Make Jasmin Happier” project and document my attempts. Though I currently don’t want to deep-dive into all the things I tried on for size (though perhaps I should do that sometime soon—a “where are they now?”-style assessment of what stuck and what didn’t), I do want to focus on what originally called to me about the IV, why it didn’t stick throughout 2021, and why I am trying again anyway.
Why the IV?
I was following a thread on TheLi.st that highly recommended this particular planner for people like me who are interested in coming up with way too many goals so that we can then masochistically document the journey of not reaching them. Wait, that’s not true. (Well, actually, it’s a little bit true.)
What called to me about the IV was that it was broken up into multiple categories including goals (by time-frame), goal-trackers (so that we can check back on our progress and then say we did), and a variety of calendar types (weekly, monthly, and yearly).
As a lefty (and I’m talking about the hand I write with, even though it’s also true that I’m somewhat radical), I also appreciated that the binding did not have a hideous large wire that no lefty can possibly reach over. And I also liked the ongoing thoughtful questions throughout the book—such as what do I put too much energy into that I want to change, how do I measure my success, etc.
The big problem as I see it is that I didn’t get the 2021 IV at the beginning of the year, so I always felt like I was a step behind. Even though January 1 is in many ways an arbitrary line in the sand, I feel extremely socially conditioned to start my goal-setting then—and, to be honest, I like that hardwired boundary.
So picking up the calendar last February felt like I had sat down in the movie theater ten minutes after the flick started. Sure, the person you’re with can loud-whisper the plot thus far while others shush you, but it’s never quite the same as experiencing it yourself from the beginning.
So what was the problem?
If you read this with some regularity (thank you!), you already know that I wear a lot of hats—as in, I could open an entire hat floor at a major department store (“Does anyone still wear a hat?” -Sondheim).
That overcommitment to projects results in a lot of hat head, yes, but also, in a clusterfuck of a Google calendar. And since my preferred modus operandi for my IV is to create a hybrid system between the book and the GoogleCal, I made life a lot more difficult (and, thus, unsustainable) than it had to be: I replicated every single thing on my GoogleCal (from work meetings to dog walks) in my IV. That, I see now, was my big no-no.
Naturally, all of this became way too much upkeep. I was spending large portions of my Sundays planning out my week and analyzing the progress (or lack thereof) that I was making on my goals, and so I was creating a system that was impossible to keep up with.
Now, some of this is the price you pay to be a goal-setter and to be a calendaring shark. By committing to a system like IV (or bullet journaling, or another type of habit tracker), you are most definitely going to need to put in the time.
In full transparency, this is not a fact I am particularly fond of. Why should my desire to be more efficient on the day-to-day, more successful in the long run, and more organized as a whole result in me needing to spend even more precious time that I don’t have on my IV? Not fair!
Are you with me? Well, guess what the answer is. The answer is … I have no idea how to conquer this particular problem. Sorry, but I never promised you a rose garden (that was one of my grandmother’s favorite sayings, so thank you for giving me the opportunity to go there—and sorry again about the rose garden).
Indeed, I am still struggling with the time commitment it takes to seemingly master the IV—and slay at life!—but I do know that I don’t need to make it quite so difficult as I did last year. I even used to color-code every single project so that when I was quickly glancing at my week, I’d know that all that purple was for Kinder Beauty, all that green was for Our Hen House, those smattering of pinks were for VegNews, and everything in brown (yes, I love my brown pen, and I suggest you not knock it ‘til you try it) was for personal projects.
I’m a pen person, it’s true. I love the way a perfect new gel color pen glides across the high-quality paper (yes, I’m also a paper snob—and yes, I’m slightly ashamed about that). But I was making an already challenging assignment that much more difficult.
Calendaring should be easier than that.
Last year was a giant one for me. My family and I bought a house in Rochester and started the satisfying-but-difficult process of making our home net-zero. We spent months looking in Vermont and then Western New York, sometimes taking day trips that were four hours each way, with all three of our dogs in the car. The last thing I wanted to do when I got home from a day like that, or a day of packing, or a day of moving, was sit down and plan my week. All I really wanted to do was watch Rachel Maddow.
And yes, that is absolutely an excuse. When I am monomaniacal about things—like I used to be about running, and like I currently am about my morning fiction-writing sessions—absolutely nothing will stop me. I am driven and motivated by follow-through in a way that’s almost pathological.
So when I let things go, like committing to my calendaring and goal assessments, you can believe I’m done-done. Though I happen to like the part of me that is ambitious AF and obsessed with follow-through, one thing I’d like to change is how dead-in-the-water I leave projects when I finally abandon them.
That is one of the main reasons why I wanted to once again invest in another IV, the 2022 variety.
And though I honestly don't know if this calendar will make it through this entire year, I do know how I can better set myself up for success with it.
So, looking back at what did and didn’t work about my IV calendaring sessions last year, here’s what I plan on changing:
I will still use my favorite color pens, but I will no longer color-code my projects. It’s terrific if you want to color-code, but for me, I found it became cumbersome.
I will still sit down and work on my IV every Sunday, but I will no longer replicate everything on my digital GoogleCal. My IV will be for the non-recurring, more special projects, and one-off happenings. My GoogleCal will complement it, but they serve very different purposes. My GoogleCal is what I will use to help me with my daily to-do lists and obligations; my IV is to hold myself accountable to my goals and major life events (no, Rachel Maddow does not need to be calendared in—unless she wants to come over for lunch, which by the way, she’s totally invited anytime).
If a prompt question in my IV doesn’t resonate with me, I will not answer it. I might use that space to jot down thoughts I feel are more relevant, or I might skip it entirely. The point is to make it work for me, in a way that will hopefully be sustainable in the long term.
I will prioritize projects with more intention. The 2022 IV has a feature that lets you write your weekly goals while tiering the top three most important ones. I have found this to be extremely useful—because one of my flaws is that I tend to think everything is equally very important. This is an ongoing issue of mine that I’m doing my best to chip away at. I know that I have a tendency to set unrealistic goals for myself and expect them to be done in an unrealistic time frame. The 2022 IV will help me become a bit more realistic and slow-rolling with my projects and ambitions.
If I put the IV down for whatever reason—whether for a week or a month or longer—I will pick it back up again. I will not let perfect be the enemy of the good, and I will do my best to avoid black-or-white thinking about the need for rigid consistency with my IV work.
For those of you who calendar in a similar way—or for those of you who want to—here are a few thousand-foot-high tips that I find useful:
Start with your 5-10 weekly goals, then tier the top three. Don’t overthink this. Just do it. Your instincts are probably spot on. Trust them.
Look at the week ahead of you, ignoring any regular meetings or occurrences for now. Break your goals up into mini-goals and pepper those throughout your week. So if at the end of the week, you want to have written 10,000 words on a writing project, that means you might want to aim for 2,000 words every weekday for the next week. Calendar out each of those on your IV (or notebook, or whatever). Do that for each of your goals. If you have too many and the mini-goals are unrealistic, move some of your goals to the following week, and then next week you can deal with the corresponding tasks that will help you achieve it—don’t bother yourself with future details yet. Repeat this for all of your weekly goals, or as many as are appropriate.
Open your GoogleCal (or whatever digital calendar you use) and over those weekly IV tasks (in this case, the 2,000 words a day—which might be an hour, or might be two, depending upon your writing speed) into your computer/cloud. At this point, you might need to drag around the times you are going to do your tasks, remembering that you probably need to prioritize work, and being sure to also include meal breaks and mental health breaks (in my case, I prioritize taking walks every day, even if they are short—which I call my “mental health 20”).
If you wind up with too crowded a schedule, or if you find you are calendaring out every single minute of your free time, then you probably have too many goals. You can either try to conquer this yourself or talk it through with a trusted friend or advisor. Sometimes, at first, prioritizing is best accomplished with an audience—both for accountability purposes and for a reality check. If you practice this enough, eventually, you won’t need someone else there to help tell you if you’re completely bananas.
You can go about your monthly, and even yearly, schedules in a similar way. One thing I find helpful to do with my IV is to map out my annual goals and break those down into smaller ones—then to jot down those smaller ones into months. This takes more work upfront, but I find it’s the easiest way to stay organized and on track for my bigger goals.
So at the beginning of each month, I check to see if I’d previously left a note related to tasks that I need to calendar in order to stay on track with my annual goals. This might be as simple as calling my niece, which I try to put in my calendar because it is not in my muscle memory to do so—and I want to be sure to speak with her regularly. Since she’s only 11, I need to take full responsibility to maintain that relationship, and peppering reminders into my IV will ensure that those scribblings will become GoogleCal events.
Remember: the direction between your IV and your GoogleCal is two-way. So even though I mostly start with my IV and then plug that into my GoogleCal, I also find it useful throughout the week to jot down things I want to make space for in a notes section of my IV. And then on Sunday, I glance at those notes and make sure to work them into the week ahead, or jot them down for a future time.
The point is, I’m getting this shit out of my head and onto the page.
I’m holding myself accountable and investing time into what I hope becomes my ultimate success.
One thing I’m learning, though, is that I need to maintain some kind of flexibility there so that the definition of success is a movable target and I am not getting stuck in the rigidity of my system or my vision. I am confident that there is a happy place between the two.
If there is a calendaring system, tool, or tip that works for you, please let me know! I’m curious, which is on-brand for me, now that it’s 2022.
xo,
jazz
P.S. I am now 46,046 words into the novel I started writing a couple of weeks ago (this is 17,408 more words than I wrote since my last Substack on January 5, which was 6 days ago). I continue to be absolutely immersed in this novel (I laughed yesterday when I realized that the best part of my day was something that happened to one of my characters and not to me), and I remain eager, motivated, and—at least to some extent—separated from expectations of what happens next (both in terms of the story as well as my own unfolding process). I will continue to keep you posted, sometimes as entire subjects of my Substack and sometimes in a postscript, like here (“Like so, like that.” -Tabitha Brown).
Well done!! I LOVE getting orgainzed ... buying planners, notebooks, sticky notes ... PENS! I rarely stick to it though ... I'm envying and vicariously enjoying your considerable progress, even if it's not totally "perfect."