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Comment by dmd | Hacker News Reader

I think you're reading more into this than I meant. For example, today:

    [todo/home] clean air filters
    [todo/home] take out trash
    [todo/home] refill [daughter]'s medication
    [work] 9:30 meeting with [person]
    [home] 10:30 doctor appt @ 313 river
    [home] 11:30 [daughter] dropoff at middle school orientation
    [work] 13:45 meeting with [person]
    [home] 16:00 [daughter] cello lesson
    [todo/work] 16:45 check if zpool is done resilvering
    [home] 19:30 ?outdoor contradance @ c?

I cannot imagine how people operate without a calendar. How would you remember a half dozen or dozen things, every day, some of which might have been scheduled weeks or months in advance?

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It's simple, I don't have things like that that I need to do on any sort of daily basis.

I have a work calendar for work meetings, but never saw a need for personal calendar.

OK sure I put doctor and dentist on my personal calendar, but dentist is 2x a year and doctor is like once a year for a physical. On my personal calendar I might have a dozen things put on it for the whole year. Some upcoming family event, some wedding, etc.

I probably have 20-30 “personal”events a week. But that’s because I have two kids.

My dentist and doctor schedule the next appointment during my appointment. So if I had my annual physical appointment tomorrow, my next appointment would be 8/23/2026 which I definitely would not remember, even if they gave me an appointment card. If I'm lucky they'll call me to remind me a few days before, but having it on my calendar ensures that I don't schedule a meeting (or travel!) during that time.

In my case: I don’t have that many TODOs. For instance, I clean home twice per week, on Mondays and Thursdays. Don’t need to write it down anywhere. I have perhaps 2 or 3 doctor appointments per year (and they are usually within a few weeks in advance, so easy to remember). I don’t have kids (this one could be the game changer, I admit).

Work-wise: sure, I have everything in the work calendar. But i have separate laptops for work and personal life. I never mix them.

If we want to go out for dinner, we just go. Cinema? We just go as well. No appointments. I do exercise at home. We usually travel around 2 times per year (again, not easy to miss)

My wife is 35 weeks pregnant and I go with her to all her OB appts. If we didn't put it on a shared calendar, someone is gonna miss it (though to be honest it'd probably be me, which isn't the end of the world).

We almost never schedule dinners, but we buy cinema tickets ahead of time (or concert tickets, or whatever event). Those ones are hard to remember because the show may be at 6 but doors open at 5 so lots of stuff needs to be coordinated.

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