Your time

It’s a place you should want to visit. It shouldn’t be feared. Or avoided.

You should love your calendar for simplifying your life by constraining what’s possible. A calendar is a recurring reminder of how our universe works:

1. Events involving an individual must happen one at a time
2. Time can’t be saved; it can only be spent

Time is much more like food than money. Time arrives, perishes the moment it’s ingested, and then gets excreted in the form of memories.

If time is food for memories, a calendar is a buffet of your time. If you don’t get in line and help yourself constantly, others will help themselves—to your time. They’ll be responsible for your memories.

Few task management systems arrange actions spatially such that each action’s size is proportional to the time required to complete the task. Most calendars, on the other hand, make it easy to “size” appointments based on durations.

To fail to schedule work that you, yourself, deem important is to put your wants last in line. You should regularly schedule non-meeting time on your calendar.

It’s your time after all. Until it isn’t.