599: Datebook

A Thousand Things to Talk About

Do you keep a written / digital calendar?

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Full episode script

Calendar management. As someone that regularly looks at about eight different calendars when having my family’s weekly scheduling meeting, calendar management is seriously life.

Which I’m not alone at. I’ve seen more business coaching and executive coaching and personal development focused pieces of advice about calendar management than you can shake a stick at. The overarching theme is that managing your calendar is the written (or digital) manifestation of managing your time, and therefore managing your life. Was this always the case?

There’s a number of arguments that when human beings started tracking and predicting the movement of time is when humans started planning ahead, which plays a huge part in everything that came before.

Up until a few years ago, modern theory was that timekeeping and calendar-keeping in earnest around 5,000 years ago.

In 2013, however, an analysis of an excavation site from 2004 suggested that the set of 12 pits aligned to the planet’s cycles from about 10,000 years ago was an early calendar that not only measured the lunar months, but also corrected the calendar on the winter solstice to correct for the differences between solar and lunar timekeeping..

This early calendar was far from the shared Google calendars of the day, but do show the shifting relationship that our species was developing with time long ago — and a shift that eventually led to the way we calendar, and view time, today.

This script may vary from the actual episode transcript.