Before tailoring a new calendar, you need some style consultation. Schedules are personal, perhaps one of the most personal things you will ever have. One size does not fit all. Just because the schedule looks good does not mean it works well for your life. The best schedule is the one that empowers you to walk confidently into your day, knowing you look your best. All the right things are on display. All the less than desirable things are being discretely managed. In order to accomplish that, you need to know more than just how to schedule. You need to know how to schedule for you. Identifying your personal style is an ongoing process. Just like your waistline, your lifestyle is going to shift over time. Sometimes drastically. To fully exploit the scheduling methods I will share further on, you have to master the art of understanding the *shape* of your life, so to speak. I know, you probably thought you were just here for some simple time management tricks, but bear with me, because things are about to get a little weird. Ready for some calendaring psychology?

You have goals, which is why you are still reading. You have things that drive you, be they money, dreams, or whatever. Underlying all these more shallow pursuits is a deep set of personal values. I will call these your core values. Maybe you are keenly aware of them. Maybe you have formed them without realizing it. Either way, you must find them and flesh them out if you want to make the best of your time.

Allow me to use a personal example. I love photography. I am passionate about it. I dedicate a lot of time, money, and brainpower to photography, but it is not a core value. Photography does, however, connect to multiple core values in my life. Photography empowers me to express myself to the world and share pieces of my experience with the world around me. Sharing who I am with the world is a core value. Photography allows me to connect with people, both through the experience of shooting them, and through the resulting image. Making portraits and taking candids teaches me about people and enables me to understand them more deeply. Understanding humanity is a core value. Photography empowers me to convey ideas, which are almost always directly linked to my core values. Does photography fill a need in my life? Yes, *but*–and this is a big but–not all photography. In fact, there was a time I practically abandoned photography. I was so burnt out on doing it for money and shooting things I couldn’t care less about that I lost touch with why I had picked up the camera in the first place. Photography fulfills what I will call a “why” in my life. Several, in fact. However, if I lose sight of the reason I am doing this, I can easily end up going through the motions and become disenchanted with the thing itself. When it fails to connect to my core value, it stops being meaningful to me.