Early last month I shared a video about the book Essentialism by Greg McKeown. Since then I’ve been thinking a lot about what’s essential and how I can get better at focusing on those things.
This past weekend I packed up a bunch of t-shirts (I’m no longer holding on to things that may fit again at some point) to donate and a large stack of books to take to the used book store. It’s my intention to continue to weed to decrease clutter and help me focus more on what really matters.
I also started using Fantastical as my calendar app across my laptop, phone, and iPad (again, I don’t get paid to mention or review products). Yes, there is a subscription fee, but there a number of features that I really like:
- I was able to easily connect all of my calendars to it (Outlook, Google, and iCloud)
- I can change the colour of particular calendar events. For example, in my work calendar I use a different colour to denote a meeting vs. time I’ve blocked off to get work done
- I was able to easily get my Todoist tasks to show up in the sidebar for each day.
- I can not only check off Todoist tasks as done, but easily add them to Todoist from within Fantastical
- I can schedule a meeting in Teams while in Fantastical (I haven’t figured out if I can do this with Zoom yet)
- It’s a clean interface and uses natural language for calendar and task entries
- There’s a menu bar dropdown access to see Fantastical while in another application
- I can see events in multiple zones, making it easier to schedule meetings with someone in another province or country
I’ve only been using it for a few days, but so far Fantastical has helped me stay focused on what I need to focus on, and has made it much simpler to plan my days.
