How do you tame your days?
Journals, diaries, to-do lists... the dreaded online shared calendar. Tell me (and each other) what works when the moving parts refuse to be pinned down.
Welcome to What Now? with Lindsay Johnstone. I’m a writer, literary critic and workshop facilitator based in Glasgow, Scotland. Post-therapy, I’m holding the necessary space for myself and others entering midlife while very much still figuring things out.
Last autumn, I ended a three-year psychotherapy journey asking myself, ‘What now?’ I vowed that I’d replace those thrice-weekly therapeutic hours with something, but wasn’t then sure quite what.
Enter Substack.
Hi friends,
At 4.20pm on Thursday afternoon, deep in the final preparations for the first session of my Writing for Better Mental Health course, I took a call from my husband’s hairdresser asking where he was. He’d clearly forgotten all about the appointment and wasn’t answering his phone. Though I didn’t tell the salon manager this, I knew why. He was sitting in a different chair altogether on the other side of town having his ears syringed (he won’t mind me telling you now, for he has since announced it the single most transformative procedure he has ever paid for). The Google calendar had earlier confused me with this reminder… I had no recollection of scheduling an ear wax removal appointment. Whose alert was this? I had nothing written in my diary.
The next day, a High Priority alert appeared on my phone screen telling me the bunnies were due at the vet. But was this the appointment that had been cancelled and rearranged? And, actually, hadn’t we moved vets since the one the cat went to for his lion cut turned out to be far cheaper and friendlier? Cue hurried calls to the vet that is no longer the vet and the vet that now is the vet to iron things out.
As I type, it’s Saturday afternoon and I wonder, can my husband see that, today, my Google calendar is telling me that Pluto is on its 146th day in retrograde? Saturn its 99th? That it’s the autumnal equinox? Is he privy to the reminder I’ve set myself for a Substack subscription I’ve been on the fence about auto-renewing?
Oh, the tyranny of the shared calendar. The confusion of it. The TMI-ness of it. I long for the simple days of the family planner on the wall. The one that in our household, I still purchase in earnest each autumn telling myself this will be the year we'll get visual.
Yet year on year ours remains conspicuously bare despite our family’s ever-increasing busy-ness. I started a thread in Chat about it on Friday, imploring you all to ‘fess up and show me how you do yours.
obliged with her super-organised tablet interface. Thank you, Donna!