 |
Illustration: Léo Hamelin
There’s a 1m-wide 2020 calendar on the wall in my office. It’s directly behind me, so any time I’m on a Zoom call it looms over us like a spectre of the year that never was.
People often comment on the calendar when they see it pop up on their screen. Often, it’s to joke about what an oxymoron a “2020 calendar” is at this point. Sometimes, however, they voice out loud something that’s lurking in those blank squares, how, since lockdown, I’ve given up on planning altogether.
I used to be a meticulous organiser. My boringly practical reason for tacking a giant calendar to my wall was needing a visual way to organise my year. I’d plan my days out in my Google calendar but that wasn’t cutting it for the big projects that I couldn’t easily see at a glance. I also wanted to have something “worky” on the office wall that inspired productivity but actually looked cute. All the yearly calendars I found on Amazon looked too corporate, so I decided to just DIY the project.
And so at the beginning of the year, I rolled out a sheet of heavy-duty paper across my kitchen island and went to work making a personalised yearly planner. It took about four hours to measure all the boxes out and then line over them with a Sharpie. I then developed a pastel highlighter colour-coding system to demarcate the different projects I wanted to track. I stuck it proudly on the wall with Command strips.
When my podcast co-host was in my office to record an episode of the show before lockdown and first saw the calendar, she remarked on its limitations. Once something is committed with a pen, it’s not impossible to remove, but it’s going to look a mess. But I wasn’t put off by its permanency; if anything I found it comforting. I work well to a hard, immovable deadline so I leaned into the pressure of my giant paper calendar.
And then came lockdown and I abruptly stopped putting anything on it. Except for a couple of birthdays, the markings end in April at a family holiday highlighted in green that we never took.
For weeks, not only did the giant calendar sit blank, so did all my other organisational systems. I stripped my digital diary of its time blocks and deleted my to-do lists. I saw no point in making plans. Recently, however, my planning itch has started gnawing at me once again. I’ve found myself taking baby steps lately by making mini-plans. It started small, with daily work schedules and then socially distanced gatherings pencilled in a whole week out.
I’m relearning the art of planning. I hold a new mantra now that plans should be about finding a sense of direction rather than trying to exert a misguided illusion of control. Now, I plan what I can and just leave the rest be.
I don’t know what to do with the wall calendar, though. Some days I think about tearing it down because it bums me out too much to be reminded of a time when I could make big plans without a second thought. Then, on other days, it gives me a muddled sense of hope that someday planning will be easy again. For now, though, I have no plans for my calendar and I’m ok with that.
The List
🎙Season four of the podcast is here! The first episode is an interview with the writer Pandora Sykes about her new book, How Do We Know We’re Doing It Right? We chatted about why we’re obsessed with finding happiness in our jobs, why we should include unpaid labour in our conversations about work and why it’s time to find a new definition of success. Work never sounded so good.
In other podcast news, tickets for our masterclass on making a profitable podcast are selling fast. The first module is next week, so grab a ticket while you can
“Put action behind your rewritten company mission statement.” Black women calling out their employers is the first step, now the actual work must begin. Here are practical solutions for organisations to build anti-racist cultures
I’ve been loving Michelle Lhooq’s dispatches from the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP) in Seattle in her new newsletter about alternative media
You probably need to stop doomscrolling. No, really
Lockdown and the death of the bra
Calls for pitches
