Ben Sauer’s Blog

A while back I heard about how Seinfeld managed to write a joke every day: he plotted it on a large wall calendar. In essence, it became a game of ‘don’t break the chain’: make sure there’s a mark on the calendar every day you write a joke.

My personal productivity struggle has been songwriting. I don’t have much time in the day for it, but even 5 minutes can sometimes produce interesting results. Now that I’m rather short of time, I’ve been thinking of ways to use Jerry’s method to make sure I at least do some kind of writing every day.

Today, in about half an hour I hacked something together. I don’t have space for a wall calendar, but I do have some basic php skills and I use google calendar. I took a php application called icalendar and set it to import a new google calendar I created called ‘music’.

Now every day that I do some songwriting, I will put an ‘all day’ event into the music calendar, which will show up in icalendar’s year view (with a mild bit of template hacking). There’s a red dot on each day I manage to get something down.

Clearly, there’s not much to see yet (see below) but I’ll set the calendar as my home page as a daily reinforcement and see how it goes! I thought it was important to see the whole year view, hence my desire to see it in something other than google calendar.