My Google Calendar was overcrowded: it contained not only important appointments but also plenty of things I could easily snooze or skip—birthday wishes and friendship reminders, (cleaning) chores, reminders for exhibitions, performances, and festivals, plus all the weekly TV shows, podcasts, and articles I consume.
Even though I’d created separate calendars for different types of appointments, it still wasn’t ideal. To keep a clear overview, I always entered important appointments as “all-day” events so they would appear at the top. I had to correct Google when it automatically assigned a specific time to these appointments, making them drop to the bottom of my view. That actually caused me to miss an appointment once.
Also, when I took the completed appointments out of the cloud by transferring them to my TaDa list (in Obsidian), that didn’t look very nice. It didn’t “spark joy” 🙂
My Obsidian vault is not synched. Because I am a cheapskate 🙂 but also because I like to keep things simple. And I can access my Google sheet anywhere, so that is a good place for my current appointments.
Just like in highschool, I now created my own planner from scratch. Back then, I’d draw boxes for each day with a mechanical pencil and fill in the dates for the year. Now, I did it digitally. In both cases a soothing task. Entering recurring appointments takes a bit of work, but it also makes me more aware of the scarcity of my time.
Because I have synesthesia, I associate the days of the week with specific colors. For me, Monday is bottle green, Tuesday is soft yellow, and so on. That’s why I used these colors in my planner.
Each line shows the day of the week and the date. To keep the visual layout uncluttered, the text appears in the same color as the cell itself.
My new planner only has room for three appointments per day. On Saturdays and Sundays, the limit is two. I’ve been trying this out for two weeks now. So far, it’s really helping me stay focused!
If I copy the first week into Notepad++ or Visual Studio, it looks like this:
TRUE Mon 2025-09-08 0900 Work
TRUE Mon 2025-09-08 1100 workshop
TRUE Mon 2025-09-08 1600 webinar “How to start with SEO?”
TRUE Tue 2025-09-09 0900 Work
TRUE Tue 2025-09-09 blog post
FALSE Tue 2025-09-09
…
Here you can see the day and date indicators that were previously hidden in the sheet.
With find and replace, this can be adjusted to
– [X] Mon 2025-09-08 0900 Work
– [X] Mon 2025-09-08 1100 workshop
– [X] Mon 2025-09-08 1600 webinar “How to start with SEO?”
– [X] Tue 2025-09-09 0900 Work
– [X] Tue 2025-09-09 blog post
– [ ] Tue 2025-09-09
…
This goes into my TaDa list. In Obsidian, I still use the simple task definition (‘- [ ]’). I did try out the Obsidian plugin Tasknotes recently, inspired by Muhammed Ali Kilic‘s enthusiasm for it. However, for me, it felt a bit too corporate and cumbersome.
One line per task—that’s how I roll, and I’m sticking to it.
I can embed my Google calendar in Obsidian if I want to see my ToDo and TaDa next to eachother.
Bit by bit, my life is becoming a little simpler again.
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