Calendar events that won't give you anxiety

⌗Calendars are stressful

I do not have the most beautiful relationship with my calendar. It’s often completely empty or completely full. Sometimes, I even feel frustrated with my calendar, wondering if the meeting could have been avoided using a Slack thread or something. For me, the calendar has always been work stuff and rarely is much else. I think this is fine, but sometimes it can be one-sided. The work events just pile up, meeting after meeting. I am not alone in this. I have seen this problem quite a bit. Especially when working in a remote environment, the stroll over to a desk is replaced with a more official meeting. There have been some solutions to this problem, and I think there are some good ones.

⌗Time Blocking your calendar

There is a popular method of time blocking on your calendar to promote things like deep work. I love this idea but often find it can be relatively rigid without maintenance. Usually, I would block out time for deep work, and a co-worker would need help fixing an issue. Depending on my train of thought, I would tell them to give me some time or jump right into helping them resolve the issue. This happens so often that those time blocks become hopes and dreams of what a person’s day could be and not what it actually is.

If this happens to your time blocks, I would suggest changing up the blocks. I often do this radically. If I had deep work in the early morning, I would move it to the late afternoon just to shake things up. To be honest, I often abandon time blocking after realizing that my calendar is a mess due to the time blocks I do not even take.

I would like a more flexible solution that can help me avoid the dreaded meeting blocks, and I have adapted an extension I have been building for a while to help me with this.

⌗Mujō’s calendar events

Mujō stemmed from a want to manage my time better and not wanting to burn myself out again. We recently launched a calendar integration with Google Calendar, and I have seen some exciting results. It allows me to make tiny blocks of time on my calendar that I am going to take a break stopping automatic behaviors. It has also been super helpful for things like transitions to different work. I’ll plan a 15-minute break to get ready to transition to a new task. It really can be used in many ways.

Check out Mujō

Available on the Chrome Web Store

Take it for a spin. It has been a passion project of mine. I hope you enjoy it, and if you have any feedback, please let me know. I am always looking to improve it.

⌗Automatically create calendar events?

On the initial launch, we turned this off because of a few things. Mujō algorithm for detecting optimal break times does not take into account your calendar events yet, but it is coming soon. Creating the events automatically would be optimal, but we want to ensure that we are not also trashing people’s calendars with these recommended break times. Currently, you must click a button in the extension to create the event, but I hope to make this automatic in the future.