A month-by-month retrospective on 2019 and how moving from a calendar-shaped to-do list to shared, categorized, weekly scheduling improved the way I managed my own time and coordinated with others.
I am Sanghyo Yee, a product designer at the startup Buzzvil. At the turn of the year, I decided to look back on 2019 through my digital calendar for three reasons:
I began using a MacBook and iPhone in 2015 and was already comfortable with Apple Calendar because the devices synchronized well. Simply noting a date and setting an alert was useful: my synced iPhone would remind me on the morning of the event.
Looking back, though, I think I used the calendar like a to-do list until 2018. I recorded major checklist items, but the calendar did not tell me exactly when I would do each task.
Apple Calendar schedules an event at 9–10 a.m. by default. Used as a simple daily notebook, it produces a picture like the one below.By December 2019, a single week looked enormously complicated. Here is what changed:
Google Calendar to Apple Calendar.share my schedule with other people.work, personal, and external events.monthly to weekly scheduling.recurring events, private events, and vacation schedules.Apple Calendar's year view outlines each date based on its number of events:
I used that view to compare 2018 and 2019. The broad insights were:
Below are the public events I could extract from the calendar, organized by month.
Using my calendar better has made me much more productive. It cannot answer exactly whether I “lived more diligently in 2019 than in 2018,” but I am proud that I learned to treat both my own time and other people's time with more care. In 2020, I want to record more intelligently so I can achieve even more. Thank you for reading.
ⓒ 2020. SangHyo Yee, All Rights Reserved.