A solo-poly organization scheme for Google Calendar/Sheets

[kawatan]

Here's my list of calendars and how I use them in Google Calendar.

• "Work and Networking", magenta - a manually made partial mirror of my Outlook calendar for my day job, plus things like continuing education opportunities and local networking happy hours. (I keep this here so when I'm making things like medical appointments, I know when my meetings are, so I don't work from home for an important meeting or some such.) This unfortunately has to be manual for permissions-based reasons.
  
• "Medical", orange - straightforward: my medical appointments. This is separate from
• "General" (see below) so that it's a different color by default on my calendar.
  
• "Reminders", purple - reminders to pay my rent, due dates to return this or that, to submit that other thing, et cetera.
  
• "Optional", dark blue - activities that I may or may not do, local events I've heard about but haven't committed to: poly cocktail hours, tabletop game Meetup, work-sponsored yoga class, local street fair... One-off events can be transferred from Optional to General when I've decided to commit to them. I go to most of my regularly recurring ones but they're not necessary the way the General one is.
  
• "Travel", gold or light green - specifics on travel I'm doing, including flights, AirBNB info, and other activities. This isn't in "General" (see below) for two reasons: the contrasting color cheers me up, and the "Travel" calendar itself is on a non-US Eastern time zone to match where I'm going. I have a light green "Travel - Europe" calendar in the Central European time zone and a gold "Travel - West Coast" calendar in the Pacific time zone. I'll have to decide eventually on a new color for my Asian trip in 2020. When my travels keep me in US Eastern, I just put this stuff in "General".
  
• "General", dark green - anything I'm absolutely doing that doesn't fit those categories. Dinner with my parents, dates, etc.
  
• "Other People", gray - things partners, family, and friends are doing that don't involve me. Included so I remember people's birthdays (I almost never check my Facebook feed and some of my partners don't use FB anyway), when not to call, when comets are coming/leaving town, to check in after partners' doctor's appointments, etc.

Plus two calendars I follow from others: US holidays (teal) and my sports team's schedule (red).

I make fairly extensive use of the Notifications feature, things like remembering to leave home early for morning meetings.

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Every other week I stare at my calendar and compile it into a day-by-day schedule, that I then send to each of my partners through their preferred text messaging service, like so:

Sun MMM DD: nothing planned
Mon MMM DD: this event
Tue MMM DD: that event
Wed MMM DD: nothing planned, might do laundry
Thu MMM DD: foo event, with you
Fri MMM DD: bar event, with Other Partner
.
.
.

I generally don't include work in this unless something unusual is happening.

On my personal to do list is a way to build/initialize this list less manually. I'm experimenting a bit with IFTTT but haven't had much luck yet.

In the meanwhile, I created a Google Sheet called "stuff that will happen".

Its rows are:
Date | Day of week | activity | concatenate | split

"Date" and "Day of week" fill automatically; I currently write "activity" manually.

"Concatenate" just concatenates those first three columns, formatted like above.

"Split" is blank except for every other Sunday, when it says "SPLIT". This just reminds me when to send the "next two weeks" thing.

This means I get to just copy/paste entries from the "Concatenate" column into the text service of my partner's choice; this is already an improvement over past behavior when I was doing it fully manually.

I also have a Conditional Formatting bit set up so the cells darken when the date in column A is in the past, to mark "where I am" in the sheet.