Mid-year review

My Google Calendar for March

I've started something new this year to keep track of my days and weeks and months. For the last half decade or more, I've been really effective in keeping an online google calendar that ensured that I was meeting deadlines, scheduling appointments, and attending to my personal and family business around my work responsibilities.

However, I started to notice this year that I was just keeping up, and I wasn't extending myself any more than my calendar events and reminders. This means that the things that I did not schedule on an hourly or weekly basis kind of got lost in the orchestra of my life. So monthly, quarterly, and yearly goals, habits, and patterns were not logged and therefore unmet. To change this, I started keeping a real physical planner (I chose Panda Planner because I liked its orange cover and because it also forced me to think more intentionally about my life and personal ambitions with entries for "affirmations" and "focus" and "things I'll improve").

It's been three weeks since I got started, and I'm not sure how well it's working yet. Flipping back and forth between monthly, weekly, and daily is kind of annoying. I wish there were an online way to do this-- to merge my daily and weekly schedule with monthly/quarterly/yearly plans, habits, goals, and targets. The Panda planner doesn't have yearly or five-year planning horizons. It's only monthly, weekly, and daily. What I really need is something over a longer timescale, because that's how I'd like to plan. I still have to consult my google calendar every week and day anyway to make sure that I am meeting all my hard-and-fast work obligations. And now I have added my Panda to fit all this within the framework of a monthly research/teaching and personal vista. That's not good enough. And I don't know a way around this problem. Do you?