The Year Behind Me

There’s a year hanging on the wall behind me on every video call.

It’s one of those enormous calendars, the kind that needs a clear stretch of wall and a little nerve to put up. Before January, we talked it through with family and friends and filled it with things to look forward to. Big ones and little ones, spread out so there was always something coming around the corner.

Then, most mornings, I write one line about yesterday. Something I noticed. Something I enjoyed. Not something I made happen. It’s just something that happened and deserved a witness.

That turns out to be a strange and lovely way to start a day. Appreciation gets the first word before the inbox gets a view.

Some squares stay blank. Nothing significant happened, and nothing gets forced onto the page. I look at those now and think… okay, that’s actually nice. I had some breathing room.

(It’s in my camera background, so anyone on a call can read along or ask me what the big stretch of green blocks represent [ Portugal! ]. It’s still mostly for me, and a little for my family when we sit down to look back on the year and sketch the next one.)

So I’m doing one for work now, too.

That sounds redundant, because work already has calendars. It has launch plans, quarterly touchpoints and a marketing plan with every month spoken for. Those plans are directionally accurate, and very little of them is in your hands. A plan like that survives the way a map of a river survives. It’s right about the general direction and useless about where the water is this morning.

A company calendar records what the business intends to happen to you. The wall asks something else. But what is it for?

Notice what’s left when the only things allowed on the wall are things you control. The launch date comes off. The positioning work that decides what the launch means stays. Customer visits go up. So do the long, muddy routes to an insight that most people skip because the dashboard is closer and has air conditioning. What you bring to the table goes on the wall. What the table does with it stays on the plan.

That’s positioning, pointed at yourself. A product described by its roadmap is describing hopes. A product described by what it does for the person in front of it is describing a fact. A marketer at review time works the same way.

Review time is where the two calendars finally sit in the same room. The goals column will say what landed and what didn’t, and a lot of that was decided in rooms you weren’t in. The wall gets its own three questions. Did I learn a lot. Did I get out from behind the computer enough. Did I show up for other people’s projects, the ones with someone else’s name on the slide.

Admittedly, blank squares will be harder to love at work. A quiet day at a desk feels like falling behind, and nobody hands out credit for breathing room… but a work year with no empty squares in it isn’t a full year. It’s a year nobody had time to notice.

The plan will remember what the year was supposed to be. The wall remembers what it was for. The wall will be what helps set us up for success more next year…the way we want to define success for ourselves.

Stay Positive & Today Is “Vroom Vroom” On My Calendar… See You At The Motorcycle Track