New Calendar

I use academic year calendars, so I recently got myself a new calendar.

When I was a kid, my Dad and Mom tried to help me be a little more organized about getting schoolwork done. My Dad worked for a small family business, and one of the promotional things they'd do was to send out little calendar pocket books before the new year. My Dad used one, though my Mom used a bigger book that lived on a kitchen counter or in a cubby thing in the kitchen; but then, my Mom had to keep track of everyone's stuff.

I started with the shop calendar, and used those for several years. They were great, just the right size (the size of a checkbook), with each opened page area showing a week. At the end of each week, my Dad turned down the corner of the page, so that he could open it to the current week without searching, so that's what I learned to do. When I was on top of things, I'd write down my homework stuff, band stuff, and even family stuff. Mostly, I wasn't quite on top of things.

I'm a bit more on top of things nowadays, thank goodness. It helps not to be 13 or 14. And I use a slightly larger calendar now, because that's what our campus sells. The one I choose has a plastic cover and shows a week at a time, but doesn't fit in a pocket nearly as easily as the old ones did. But it does show some of the more important campus events. Weirdly, it doesn't preprint information about finals week, classes starting or stuff like that. I suppose they do a sort of general printing with the big, common holidays, for lots of schools and then put our specific cover on.

Part of today's plan is to fill in the calendar, the school stuff, family stuff, obligations, fun stuff. I sort of like doing that because it's a way of reviewing the past year and anticipating the coming year, and mostly that's good.

But no, my calendar doesn't "link" to email or anything. I can use it walking between classes, though, and I don't have to worry about recharging it.

I know some academics like regular calendar year calendars, but I'm not quite sure why I don't use one. Habit, maybe? Are there advantages to one or the other?