Productivity: Use Your Calendars

I was listening to one of the earlier episodes of Not Overthinking where Ali mentions knowledge exposure and how for him and many others certain things seem obvious, but some people haven’t heard or don’t think about them. One of his examples was Thomas Frank’s productivity course which was based on this process and one of the examples was using a calendar.

This reminded me how I really don’t use mine and also highlighted the ridiculousness of my not having phone and laptop calendar synced (I’m not an Apple user at all currently, and I never had only Apple products with the calendars and such automatically synced). I also, in the middle of our densest birthday month, realized I really need to put all birthdays and anniversary dates in my calendar.

I used this tutorial to get my Google Calendar in my Outlook calendar.

I used this tutorial to get my Outlook calendar in my Google calendar.

I then had to check the calendar box in my Google calendar on my phone so that the Outlook items showed up. Once everything synced, I think put all my family birthdays and anniversaries along with the year of birth/marriage in with an annually recurring event. How simple and smooth. And I don’t have to ask stupid questions about dates I should have memorized.

I wrote this months ago, I’ve not done a very good job at looking at my calendar with any regularity. I still rely a lot on my memory. I need to work on this in the new year. Its usually around this time that I start making New Year Plans, actually often earlier.