In terms of actually plotting my day and week. Electronic calenders for me don't lead to schedules I'm likely to be able to stick to.

The calendar for me is a coordination tool between me and many other people. Other people can see my calendar, too, and see whether I am available or not.

I guess it also depends on the office structure, I'm very lucky that our team is just the right size for a single secretary who coordinates our calenders if we ask.

And mostly we coordinate with ourselves.

I'm working in a project with around 4000 people across 330 teams and quite a few different sites in a comm-heavy role - time blocks on the calendar to get work done can be a necessary survival tactic :-)

Setting a reminder that’s visible the moment I wake up and see my phone has a better chance of reminding me than something I’ve written on paper.

But I personally use both. Paper is for ongoing goals I’m working towards since I’ll glance at it several times a day (unless I forget my notebook), but for events and so on, electronic reminders are a “do this now” sort of thing that I can’t accidentally miss because they’re so distracting.

Ah I think the way I work leads to the opposite working in my notebook and forgetting to check my phone/emails.

I think I'd struggle moving into that kind of setting.

I feel this hasn’t much to do with calenders themselves, but I’m really curious why you wouldn’t stick to schedules you set electronically.

Is it about the ability to edit it afterward ? Or because it’s not in your hand writing ?

I think the biggest and most obvious when it goes wrong factor is.

That electronic calenders are less intentional people chuck over potential times and I don't necessarily consider if they are practical slots. Often I have multiple, up to five, conflicts with various meetings automatically appear in my calender.

If I personally write it into my calender I have a stronger connection with the decision to attend or act at that time. And I just have a better sense in my mind of what that means in terms of that's in a fortnight, that's the day before Christmas etc.

But what's come up in these replies is I'm also at a different team structure that my previous experience with Google calendars. Maybe I'm just not good in a large workforce Vs in a small 5 person team in a 20 office.

Thanks!

I think having a personal, isolated and well goomed version of what will be your day's schedule is an understandable proposition.

You're probably right that it comes down to the organization's attitude towards time. I currently have meetings that magically appear a few hours before they start, and some disappear or move around. We get Slack messages to discuss and/or negociate these changes, but we see calendering as something fundamentally flexible.

Using pen and paper for that would just make us waste paper without affecting how it works in practice (thinking about it, I was in a startup where the day+week's main schedule was on the corner of a whiteboard, and it would get rewritten quite a bit)