Make your calendar sacred or it will stop helping you

A calendar is powerful when it’s a promise and weak when it’s a wish list. Many people paste daily to-dos into their calendar, then spend the evening rolling them forward like luggage. After a few days, the calendar becomes a graveyard of broken promises and you stop trusting it. The fix is simple and strict: only put what truly must happen on that day or at that time.

Think of your calendar as the “hard landscape.” Appointments go there. Day-specific actions like “call Mioko Friday” go there. Day-specific info like travel e-tickets or meeting room numbers belong there. Everything else lives on context-based lists: Calls, At Computer, Errands, and Agendas for key people. When the day changes, you don’t rewrite your whole life, you simply look at your hard edges and choose from your lists within them.

Each morning, scan the next two weeks. That quick look ahead triggers the prep actions you need—“book a room,” “buy a gift,” “draft slides”—which you add to your lists by context. A small story: a parent scanned two weeks, saw a school recital, and added “sew button on dress” to a Home list. That five-minute task saved a last-minute panic on the night of the event.

If you want to experiment with time blocking or focused work windows, do it—but don’t confuse a focus block with a must-do. Keep your calendar honest and you’ll stop ignoring it. If it’s not a must, it stays off the grid and onto a list. That single boundary can restore trust.

This approach leans on implementation intentions—linking specific cues (day/time) to actions—and reduces decision fatigue by separating hard commitments from flexible options. By protecting the calendar from ‘maybe,’ you create a reliable cue for action and keep your brain from renegotiating all day.

Put only appointments, day‑specific actions, and day‑specific info on your calendar, then move everything else to context lists so you can choose flexibly within your day. Each morning and afternoon, scan the next 14 days and capture any prep into those lists, so you’re not surprised. When something feels like a ‘maybe,’ keep it off the calendar and add it to a small ‘if time’ note drawn from your lists. Protect the calendar’s honesty for one week and watch how much easier it is to plan the day. Give it a try tomorrow morning.