Who Needs a Calendar Anyway?
Who Needs a Calendar Anyway?
“Who needs a calendar anyway?” This was my exact sentiment when I heard someone say, “let me check my calendar” for the first time.
My sentiments towards personal calendars weren’t, as you might have guessed, rooted in the absence of activities, events or important meetings. My thinking came from the place of my personal experience. As I look back I’ll certainly admit my experience was somewhat limited in contrast to the capacity I would soon grow into.
You see, I could, up to that point in my life, maintain a solid mental record of important dates, up-coming events and scheduled meetings with ease. You’re probably thinking this must have been when I was in high school, which is a funny thought, but it wasn’t. In high school, like many my age, my daily life was pretty routine between school, sports schedules and church programs. Anyone could remember it without a calendar. Even if they couldn’t, we had the built in reminder system that included parents, teachers, coaches and youth pastors.
I was the first member of my immediate family to purchase a modern cell phone. No, it wasn’t “the brick,” but it was close!
My first mobile phone had call logs, but no “phone book” or contact storage. Many of us “pre-millenial” folks remember having to memorize phone numbers; and not just our own, but everyone in our lives. I had several hundred phone numbers memorized, between family, friends, classmates, pastors, and even businesses. I didn’t have a Rolodex and I didn’t carry an address book or telephone book.
Then came the BlackBerry. While I didn’t care for it, my wife just had to have it. The BlackBerry was, at the time, next level. It did more than my family’s first in-home computer! The BlackBerry handled your calls, your contacts, your e-mail and now...your calendar. It also did a bunch of other stuff that no one ever used.
I stuck with my affinity for flip phones and progressed to not only one, but two of them. I had a work phone and a personal phone. If I wanted to talk with you then I remembered your number. At the time, I still didn’t see a need for email on my phone; I talked to people face-to-face, on the phone, or used the fax machine. Remember those?
By the time I was 33 all of this changed; not just one part, but all of it. Some of the change I experienced was tied to my personal season of life, yet many were driven by a culture shift on a global scale. Between the increases in my own personal responsibilities, massive technological advances and widespread systemic connection, my ability to hold on began to wane.
Moving from single life to married life is eventful in itself, but before we knew it we had two children and I was climbing an industry ladder in no time flat. And, as many of you already know, it was accompanied by life-altering amounts of responsibility and ever increasing demands on my time. Though this is a normal progression for most people and not out of the ordinary, I still found I could handle it without the need of a calendar.
It was about this time that I began to see some shifts in the workplace. This email thing I had rebuffed was now becoming the norm and would soon become the gold standard expectation in business.
And then, it happened...the Apple iPhone. On our 4th wedding anniversary we gifted one another these fancy new phones that would revolutionize everything. The newly released iPhone 3G was a cellphone, iPod, calculator, GPS navigation device, email interface and boasted 8GB of memory! Yes, you read that right...only 8 GB. I think this iPhone had a 1 megapixel camera - one, 1 megapixel camera, to be more precise.
And in our hands, we found our light-speed ticket to the cyber rat race. It was profoundly slow by today’s standards yet we were now plugged into the Matrix and had no idea what it meant for the future.
This is where the shift really began for me. I now had access to my phone and my music, text messaging was now easily and immediately accessible, all from one device. With it, we all soon experienced a huge push for constant contact, not only through a phone call or text message, but now through email, too.
Technology and connectivity are incredible accelerators. They allow us to work more efficiently and seemingly cram more of everything into, well, everything.
It used to be that there was one phone in each home, for all of the family members to share. Some families even had a machine that recorded messages for you if no one answered! It wasn’t unusual for calls to be received at your place of business, which meant you could be reached at only two places. That meant when you were on a date, no one was interrupting you. When you were at church, no one was interrupting you. When you were out on an ice cream date with your kids, no one was interrupting you. Your phone was at home, where it belonged.
Think about the contrast. Today, you take your phone, your email, your calendar and practically your entire office with you...EVERYWHERE. Not only do you take it everywhere, you take it all of the time.
We are so connected that we are now programmed to ALWAYS be “on.” Literally and figuratively speaking, when was the last time you actually “powered off,” your device and yourself? We’ve become so tethered to our devices our reliance has become unhealthy. Things that were created to be tools have now become the slave masters.
With greater efficiency comes greater proficiency.
With greater proficiency comes increased capacity.
With increased capacity comes greater expectation.
With greater expectation comes greater pressure.
Just writing these words feels like an increasing weight sitting on my chest. It’s like the container of our lives has been opened up, recalibrated for maximum load and yet, we push and push to add more.
I did what most people my age did; I crammed more in. Within the next few years, we would add two children to our family and I would take on a separate, nearly full-time, volunteer ministry position at our church while still climbing the career ladder.
My mental grip on numbers started to wane as soon as I started to use the contacts app on my first iPhone. By now I have not only started to retrain my brain, I’ve increased the amount of info that I need constant, immediate access to. My ability to remember dates started to decline rather quickly as well. Soon I was dependent upon my calendar to tell me what to do and when.
I bet you’re thinking, “what’s the point of all of this? I need to use a calendar because we’ve got more to remember than we have capacity?” Yes, but that’s not all of it.
Some years back, my wife and I attended Financial Peace University. If you’re not familiar with it, this is an incredible curriculum to help people learn how to handle their finances successfully. One of the primary foundations of this course is the “budget.” Dirty word, I know. The greater purpose of the budget is to empower and enable you to decide where your money goes, not to restrict you. The power comes through your decision in telling your money where to go, rather than your money telling you. It’s about control.
This same concept is why you need to use a digital calendar tool. Your mental acuity to retain all of the information isn’t what’s up for debate. The question really is “what do you want to spend your time doing?” As the great John Maxwell would say, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”
Your calendar is your budget for time. Your calendar is where you make a plan for how you will spend that time.
This is crucial! Time is the most valuable commodity in all of creation. Resources are renewable. Time, as we understand it, is finite and most definitely not renewable. You owe it to you, your family, and your dreams to make a plan for your time. Technology makes it easy to fill and, even overfill your life, but technology will never fulfill you. This will only come when you take charge of your time budget; your calendar.
So take control and make a plan! Using the technological tools offered this day in age can make it simple to do, but you still have to choose to do it.