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Recently I quit my job to become 'retired'. This leads to a lot of changes, some more predictable than others. The lock down period and working from home during the last two years already brought some changes, like not having to commute every day and being able to have lunch with my wife.
One of the nice things of being retired, is that you don't have to set your alarm clock every day. On some days you do, on most days you don't.
Not having to hurry from meeting to meeting is also fine.
In the past, everybody had a paper calendar (sometimes also called "agenda" or "diary"). When somebody wanted to make an appointment, they had to consult you (or, if you were higher ranked, your secretary) to check your availability. It also gave you some control. You were in control regarding your schedule and also, to some extend, with whom you were meeting and when.
Early in the new millennium this all changed.
The change from a paper to a digital calendar involves much more than just the medium.
It shifts a lot of power to the person who is making the appointment. People can suddenly see when you are available, and can insert items in your calendar without consulting you first.
Very quickly, the time between two appointments reduced to nil. When someone sees you are in meeting from 10:00-11:00, they will easily put in a meeting from 11:00-12:00, and so on.
Also rescheduling meetings becomes super easy, and requires just a few clicks. This can result in some surprises. A meeting, important for you to get some things in motion, is suddenly suspended. Another meeting, which requires a lot of prep work, is suddenly a week earlier. And so on.
Before my retirement, my calendar was usually completely filled and I had to be vigilant in order to keep some space between some appointments and have some time to actually, you know, do some work.
This changed overnight. The meetings are gone, and those appointments that are there, don't tend to shift much. As a result of this, there is no need to keep an eye on the calendar app all the time, to see how much time there is left and where you have to be next.
Now I no longer have the habit to check my calendar app first thing in the morning and at regular intervals.
My first thought was to say goodbye to the calendar app, with it's data in the cloud, and move to some self managed solution. So I had to think about an alternative.
FreeBSD comes with a nice application called 'calendar'. You feed it with a ~/.calendar file, or, it bit more flexible, a ~/.calendar directory with a bunch of calendar files (including one with the local holidays). At the start of X, through my ~/.xinitrc, Herbe gives a nice notification with the calendar events for the current day.
I tried this first, but discovered that I don't open my FreeBSD laptop every day in the morning. When the weather is fine, we have breakfast in the garden, or at least coffee in the garden. Or I do some chores in the morning, and so on.
The next thought was to put something on my smartphone (like, hmm, an app), but the thing is, I don't open my phone that often. I never installed that much apps and I use it mostly for some messaging with apps like Signal. But there are days when I don't have any "Signal-conversations".
It turns out that just as I don't open my laptop every morning, I don't open my smart phone every morning.
When I now make an appointment, or want to schedule some event, I now put it both in a file in the FreeBSD ~/.calendar directory as well as in the calendar app on my smart phone, but I am not happy with this outcome.
Something to think about ...
Hashtag: #life
$Date: 2022/06/24 20:19:15 $
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