If you wanna make better first impressions

with people you meet,

build good relationships over time,

and in general live a more successful life,

one of the simplest things you can do is be punctual.

Be where you're supposed to be

when you're supposed to be there.

Of course that's easier said than done,

because most of us live pretty complex lives.

We've got class, we've got work,

we've got meetings,

we've got secret backroom deals to get to.

So it's not always the easiest task

to keep a perfect record of your schedule

up in the three pounds of mushy

cranial material inside your head.

And honestly,

you shouldn't even be trying.

As David Allen, the original productivity guru, once wrote:

"Your brain is for having ideas,

not for holding them."

So today you, my friend, are entering calendar bootcamp.

Now, your calendar is a part

of what I love to call the productivity system,

which is the combination of external tools

that come together kind of like Voltron robots

to form this cohesive, real world source of truth

for everything going on in your life,

and that includes tasks, ideas, contacts,

and of course events.

So today I'm gonna teach you

how to set up the calendar part of that system

so that it never fails you,

and accomplishing that goal

means following three simple rules.

Number one,

set up your calendar in a way that suits you.

Number two,

add events and relevant information to those events.

And number three,

get information out of your calendar at the right time.

And the right time might not be what you think it is.

So let's kick this off with rule number one:

set up your calendar in a way that suits you.

And that starts with choosing

a calendar system in the first place,

leading us to the inevitable age-old question,

what kinda calendar is best?

Physical or digital?

And if the answer is digital,

what's the best calendar app?

Well, in the world of fitness there's this old adage.

"The best workout program

is the one that you will actually stick to."

The most hyper-optimized program for Olympians

is gonna be useless to you if you don't enjoy it,

or if you don't have time to stick with it.

That's actually why I work with a lifting coach.

If I have a super busy week,

or if I'm traveling,

Matt can just adjust my programming accordingly

and I stick to my workout.

And the same is true for calendar apps

and productivity apps in general.

The best one is the one

that you'll actually use and stick to.

Now, personally, I like Google Calendar.

Some of my friends like Apple Calendar better.

My mom actually sticks with an old school wall calendar.

That works for her.

These are all legitimate choices,

because a calendar is really a personal tool

that has one main job;

acting as that external source of truth

for your life's events.

So as I mentioned earlier,

Google Calendar is my personal calendar app of choice.

That's because it is free.

I can pull it up on my computer and my phone,

which is always with me, and that's nice.

Even my watch.

And it also has some integrations

with other apps like SavvyCal,

which I use for scheduling meetings with other people

and not doing email tag.

So for that reason,

we're gonna be using Google Calendar

as the visual example in this video.

But I do wanna mention

that there are some other great apps out there.

I've got a companion article for this video,

and you'll see them listed there.

And in general,

I will note that, again, for me,

I do think that digital calendar apps

have some very compelling advantages over paper calendars,

namely recurring event support and reminder support,

which is very nice.

But if you wanna use a paper calendar,

or a paper planner like this one,

that's totally cool too.

And there are some advantages to paper calendars as well.

- Do you always carry that calendar in your pocket?

- Yes. - For one,

it's pretty hard to get sucked into Instagram or TikTok

when you're adding an event into your paper calendar,

and also you can use markers and highlighters

to make your paper calendar "aesthetic."

Now, one thing that I like to do

when I'm setting up my calendar

is divide the different types of events in my life

into groups that I call it "life buckets."

And this was especially helpful when I was a student

and had a much more chaotic life,

'cause I had work shifts,

I had class, I had exams.

I had on-campus events,

I had scheduled study blocks

with study partners and friends.

Tons of different things going on

in all kinds of different categories.

And I think a lot of you are gonna be in the same boat.

We live very complex, multifaceted lives in many cases.

So doing this just gives you

some visual separation on your calendar,

and just gives you a better bird's eye view

of everything you have going on in your life.

Now, in Google Calendar,

you can easily choose the color of each event,

and you can divide your events

up into life buckets that way.

But I like to go one step further

and create an actual separate calendar

for each of these buckets.

And that gives me a couple of different advantages.

Number one,

I can set a default color for every single event type.

But number two, and more importantly,

I can set up default notification preferences

for each of these different calendars.

And that's very useful

because I sometimes do wanna get notified about events,

like for appointments,

but I don't need notifications

for every single event on my calendar,

like scheduled self-study time in the morning.

I don't need to be notified about that.

I know I'm gonna do it.

Rule number two is to add events to your calendar,

kind of obvious,

but also add relevant information to those events.

So in order for your calendar

to be that trusted external source of truth,

you have to actually add events to it.

But for a lot of people,

especially over the longterm,

that's kind of easier said than done,

because a lot of calendar systems have a lot of friction.

And when there's friction involved in a system,

especially a productivity system,

we start getting tempted to just try to remember things.

We go against that David Allen advice

from the beginning of the video.

We're trying to hold ideas in our head

instead of externalizing them.

And that's not good.

So what we're gonna do in this section

is go over several different tips

for getting events into your calendar painlessly

and with less friction,

but also how to make those events

more useful to you as well.

And let's start with optimizing for quick capture.

In the world of productivity,

the idea behind quick capture

is that the faster you can get something into your system,

be it a task, an event, an idea, a contact,

the more likely it is that you're actually going to do so.

And there are a lot of tools out there

that try to optimize for this.

There are GTD style inboxes,

a single default place where you basically

just dump everything when you're on the go

and then process it later.

My Ultimate Tasks Task Manager Notion template

has one built in for calendar events.

There are also some quick capture tools out there.

The one that I use personally is an app called Fantastical.

Now, earlier I said that I use

Google Calendar as my calendar system,

but what I actually do is import

those calendars into Fantastical,

which is both an iPhone app and a Mac app,

and what that gets me access to

is Fantastical's natural language processing

for adding events.

And if you've ever used Todoist,

you're probably familiar with this.

In Todoist you can type out

all the details of a task in the quick add bar,

and if you have a project tag or a due date,

Todoist will parse that information

and add it where it's supposed to be.

And Fantastical has the exact same feature.

It pulls out details like location, date, and time.

So basically I can just type,

or in many cases speak,

the event right into the title,

and it's gonna get all the information

and put it in the right place,

which is really, really nice.

I also keep Fantastical's widget

on the front page of my home screen,

so I can just tap in there and tap the Add Event button,

and that's a tip that works for pretty much

any calendar app that does have widgets.

Our next tip is a pretty big one here,

and it's to use recurring events.

This is another area where,

like I said earlier,

digital calendars have a huge advantage

over physical calendars.

If you have events that repeat,

like something that happens every single day,

or every week,

or heck, the third Wednesday of every other month,

in a digital calendar app,

you can go and set up a recurring event,

so all you have to do is put in the event's details once,

specify how it repeats and if it ends,

and that's always gonna be

on your calendar at the right time.

So those are a couple of tips

for getting events into your calendar more quickly,

but what about making those events more useful to you?

Well, one thing that I love to do

is add relevant information about an event

into the description field of that event.

I do this all the time,

because when I'm going to an event,

when it's about to start,

my calendar is the most relevant piece

of my productivity system with respect to that event.

I don't wanna be digging through my email.

I don't wanna be digging through my note-taking system.

If there's information about an event,

I'm just gonna open up my calendar and find it there.

Another useful tip is to add

optional events to your calendar.

Your set-in-stone schedule

isn't the only thing that can be on your calendar.

You can also basically give yourself options.

So as an example,

I'm currently taking a course

to get my professional barbell coach certification.

And the course comes with optional coaching calls