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This week I wrote about Merlin Mann’s Wisdom Project where the Father of 43-Folders shares life lessons he has learned — often through painful experience.
One of them is an intriguing tip for uncertain calendar events:
- Your calendar represents a portfolio of promises to your future self. Treat it that way.
- Thus: The only events allowed on a serious person’s calendar are commitments about time, location, and effort that will die if they are not successfully completed on a specific day. Full stop.
- Corollary: If you’re only tentatively committed to a calendar item—especially if the time of the event has not been mutually confirmed—title the event using Spanish-language questions marks. A future event like “
¿Pick apples with Aunt Sue?” successfully blocks out the time while also affording a quickly scannable reminder about events that still need to either be formalized or deleted.
I love the idea of the Spanish question marks surrounding tentative calendar entries, but putting it into practice proved difficult!
For some reason I have yet to discover, pressing the Option + Shift + ? key combination doesn’t work on my Mac. It’s supposed to, but it doesn’t. Yes, I’ve tried installing the ABC keyboard; that doesn’t work either.
Now I could add a Spanish keyboard and switch to that to type the ¿. What I really want, though, is a quick keyboard shortcut.
So I’ve come up with /qq, in honour of the Mann himself. I made it into a text expander snippet in Keyboard Maestro, but you could also do it in Espanso, or with the built-in Mac and iOS Text Replacement feature. FYI you really don’t need anything fancy on iOS devices, as long-pressing the ? always brings up ¿.
And today I used it for the first time. Someone called to make an appointment they said they’d confirm later this week: the perfect opportunity to add it to my calendar the way Merlin recommends. It’s good to be able to see the maybe status of this task as I peruse the week to come!
Apple, in their finite wisdom, have decided they will micro-manage our lives by deleting white space and punctuation marks from the beginning of Calendar events. Other calendars, like Fantastical, seem to leave them alone.
Rather than try to force Calendar to work (I’m sure there are ways), I’ve changed over to --Appointment? instead. It still communicates the uncertain nature of the entry, and stands out nicely from firmer “do-or-die” events.
In case you are wondering, that is very deliberately a double -- rather than the elegant (but sadly overused, these days) — em dash. The stuttering nature of two consecutive dashes provides enough visual disruption to draw my eye to the event, reminding me that a follow-up conversation with the involved parties needs to take place.
You may also like to check out Analog Office’s take on 43-Folders.
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