A calendar is an incredibly useful tool to organize your time and understand what you’re going to be doing. Truth be known, I need to use my calendar more.
But when your calendar controls what you can do, prevents you from taking risks, or doing the things you love because every free moment has been “maximized,” instead of you leveraging the tool to do the things you want to do, you have become the slave of the tool.
The daily reading plan that you set up a month ago is a really effective tool to increase the amount of reading, until your circumstances change, and you are sacrificing needed sleep to keep up with the plan.
You end up feeling guilty or disappointed yourself when you eventually fail at the ambitious goals that you set, but the reality is that you pushed beyond your normal limits and accomplished more than you would have naturally.
External supports such as accountability groups, calendars, bullet journals, life coaches, publicly stating your aspirations are all helpful, but if you relay on external structure too much, they stop being supportive frameworks and become crutches. They help you manage an injury, but we don’t want to use crutches forever.
In reality, we don’t want crutches, we want levers.
Levers make it easier to move heavy loads. They “leverage” our natural strength to do things we might otherwise not be able to do. Archimedes of Syracuse said “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” I want to be able to do better and more then I can naturally, and intentionality is part of that “better” and “more productive.”
In the pursuit of being ever more productive, you might have your iCalendar, your phone, your ToDoist list, Notion, Evernote, OneNote, GTD, a second brain, your iWatch, your reading plan, your checklist and your IFTTT (If This Then That) productivity templates in place, and that’s all well and good, BUT they only help you work faster with a higher efficiency.
They don’t help you answer the important questions of whether you should be doing these things in the first place.
They don’t answer why you’re doing what you’re doing.
They don’t tell you what is truly important in your life.
They don’t tell you who you should live for.
They don’t remind you that you’re a person, and not a machine.
And they don’t tell you if you are still the master, or if you’ve become the slave.