Once a year I used to buy a year planner. They started with Lisa Frank unicorns on ‘em when I was at school, so intrinsically gaudy that you could just sense that you had to write on them in pink ink that was either glitter or scented. At my first job, I decided I was now an adult and purchased a VERY VERY serious brown leather planner that had no whimsy at all, because it was a serious business journal! Then I realised stuff that for a lark, life was too short and hey you could buy Buffy day planners on Amazon!

Most of the time, they languished unfilled. I’d occasionally make a good faith effort when something out of the ordinary way of things came up, fill up a page with a week of ‘buy Celtic shirts’ and ‘book football ground for event’. I’d always eventually slack off. I am not one of nature’s journalers. After a few years I finally gave up and started to stock up on notebooks that I don’t use instead.

I have events planned for 2020! That’s a whole year away! In my day-to-day life I don’t even plan a week ahead. Most of the time I’m lucky if I decide what to have for dinner before I rock up to the fridge at seven o’clock and try to work out what to make with some ham, a jar of garlic, and an egg of dubious providence. In case you’re wondering, the answer is that you make ‘order a chip from the chippy’*.

Yet here I am, looking for flights to go to GRL in October, putting notes on the computer to look for flights for next February to get to the Salon du Livre, and doing a cursory look through AirBnB to see what they are like in Scarborough for UK Meet.

Then I have the schedule for writing my books, which I’ve talked about before, and one for book launch blog tours.

Oh and there’s the swag! Those are connected to the con schedule, since I need to order them in advance for events, but they also have their own internal schedule that I have to remember. Because you need to factor in what books you’ll have at the event or con, against the time it takes to design and order stuff.

So for the first time in, literally, years I have to make some effort to organise myself. Not with pen and paper though. Bless those year planners of days past, they performed admirably, but I would definitely never remember it. I’d be in Paris trying to remember when my signing was, and the information would be sat on my desk doing me no good whatsoever.

Google Calendar.

There are others. Endless calendar apps, some really good to-do list apps like Bear and To-Doist, but Google Calendar is easy, accessible, and will just pull data out of my email with the unabashed panache of an overpaid PA. Some people hate that, not me.

I’m still generally awful at putting in day-to-day stuff. You know what? I don’t need Google Calendar to remind me every day that I’m going to get up at five, and then live with its disappointment when I roll out of bed at the last minute. However, every time I’m at the airport or in a queue somewhere, I get my phone out and start filling the big stuff in.

So a week before the GRL sign-ups I get a reminder to go and check on my log-in and account, because wouldn’t you be scundered if you missed out on GRL tickets because you forget if your password was Hotshot*2 or H0tsh0t**. I’ve got a reminder set for birthdays, I get an email a few days before I have to send blog posts in.

Yet, if I’m honest with you, I’m still terrified. It feels like I’m one misplaced event away from a cascade of disaster. Like I put myself down for a signing at the Salon at 10am, it’s actually at 12.30pm, and in a year I’m living under a bridge and the UK Meet has renamed itself Tam’s Not Welcome Meet. Which seems petty, since if I’m living under a bridge I probably can’t organise tickets and transport.

Although I’m sure my Gmail will still pull the dates from my email and try to let me know.

**that is NOT my password, nor a password I ever used.