A few years back, I took a course on organization with one of my favorite business coaches, George Kao.

Until then, I had a constant sense of living for tomorrow, always hoping I’d have time to enjoy my life once I finished the current project. But seeing George’s schedule inspired me and, in retrospect, changed my life.

After seeing George’s calendar, I changed my calendar from a default monthly view to a weekly view, scheduled time for breaks, a weekly review practice, responding to emails, bigger projects and goals, exercise, and friends, and color-coded each type of activity.

I quickly discovered—as have many of my clients have since then—that this practice, which I came to call conscious calendaring—helped me develop a better sense of how much time I needed to get tasks done, set more realistic goals, pause throughout my days, close the computer at the end of the day, and accomplish my goals.

And, I found that whereas productivity culture trains us to believe that we should do more than is humanly possible and that we should hack our way into superhumanly manufacturing more time, my conscious calendaring practice helps me get a human-sized amount of the most important stuff done.

I’ve included a snapshot of a week of my calendar in the show notes. To some people, it might appear rigid or extreme to account for every moment from waking until bedtime. But I can choose to veer away from my plans if I discern that changing course better meets my needs, and I often do. And as opposed to feeling constricted, my calendar helps me experience far more ease and spaciousness than I did before.

Today, I’ll share seven conscious calendaring practices that can help you integrate more pause and presence into your life and align your life with what matters most to you.

But first, let’s talk about which calendar tool to use.

Now, I’m not making any money off of this recommendation, and I’m loathe to be a salesperson for Google. And yet, if you’re not already using a digital calendar, I strongly recommend Google calendars. Bear in mind that my recommendation to shift from a paper calendar to an online system often elicits strong resistance in people who feel wedded to a paper system, so if you feel averse to using an online system, here’s what I’d say:

If your paper system has supported you to be in right relationship with time, do what works. That said, over many years of supporting many clients to shift to an online system, I’ve discovered that nearly all of my clients find that, after some initial practice and persistence, a digital calendar helps them develop a much more choiceful and easeful relationship with time.

That’s because, as opposed to a paper schedule, an online calendar allows us to easily move blocks of time around, create repeating events, shift calendar views between monthly, weekly, and other timeframes, and make other changes to reflect our current needs. Writing on paper just isn’t so iterable. And, in case you’re new to Google calendars, I’ve included a link to a great Google Calendars tutorial in the show notes. If you are completely opposed to using an online system, you might also check out Franklin Covey planners, which I’ve seen some clients have success with.

Also, I encourage you to use only one calendar to hold all your commitments. As you may have experienced, storing commitments in multiple calendars can create a feeling of frazzledness and lead to dropped balls.

Once you decide which calendar tool you’ll use, do the following:

Set the default view to weekly, which I find works best for seeing time constraints and the regular rhythms of life.

Create repeating blocks of time to reflect your repeating daily, weekly, and monthly commitments such as workplace meetings, childcare, or exercise. These repeating events will become your default calendar, so that you don’t have to recreate your calendar from scratch each week.