My big decision for the coming new year: I’m getting off the electronic calendar matrix. I’ve always disliked the technology. I’ve finally decided to act upon it.

Being a late adopter of the smart phone, I’ve never gotten used to looking at the electronic calendar the way I used to look to my paper planners. Before the electronic calendar, I simply kept my paper planner on my desk, next to my wallet and keys, and it was the first thing I looked at in the morning, and would take with me whenever I went out of the house, along with my wallet and keys. Then came the electronic calendar, and try as I might, I still have not developed the muscle memory for it that I used to have for its predecessor.

I also find that the technology makes it difficult for me to visualize and internalize, not to mention render coherent, the way I used to, the coming days’ and weeks’ plans, appointments, and commitments. I have no idea how these things work in the brain, but with almost everything in my life, I have to see something on paper in order to work my head around it. I read a ton of stuff online, and like most people, I write on a screen, but when it comes to tasks and schedules, I need the information on paper or else it doesn’t really seem like its my own, my life, as it were.

I also resent the proliferation of platforms I’m expected to live on and through, the ways in which they’re constantly making suggestions to me how to optimize and thus make decisions about how to organize and present information to myself and other people. It’s not just Microsoft Word, which many people have noted has incorporated all kinds of AI suggestion bots that you actively have to work to ignore in order to write an article or paper. It’s as if every electronic medium is now just a version, metaphorically speaking, of Amazon. I don’t mean that in the sense of getting us to buy things we don’t want or need, though there is that. And I don’t mean that in the sense of surveillance and tracking, though there is that, too. I mean it in a more instrumental sense of personal efficacy: You get on the screen to do a simple task, and suddenly you’re inundated with a thousand suggestions and prompts, allegedly to streamline the process, when in reality, it just makes the process an endless obstacle course of decisions that you don’t need or want to make.

When it comes to the electronic calendar, I find that most of the technology’s claims to efficiency and mastery are bullshit, designed to make us ever more dependent on our phones and disguising the ways in which we are depleting ourselves of efficiency and energy.

Then, when a friend, who’s an expert in the sociology of technology, explained to me how electronic calendars emerged in Silicon Valley as a way of keeping track of flows of people who are forever in meetings or moving in and out of hallways on their way to and from meetings, it clicked for me: This whole technology is designed to incorporate each of us into an ever extending network of other people’s existences, leaving us with less and less sense of our own intentional time and planned space. We’re all expected now to be part of the flow of other people’s time and other institutions’ space.

And, then, when another friend, who works at an academic institution, told me how research institutes are now blending the personal calendars of the staff into the working calendars of the institution, I decided, enough.

I’m going back to the way I used to do things. Starting January 1, this is how I’m organizing my life.