# Colour Makes My Calendar Work Smarter, Not Harder ## Colour reduces cognitive load – whether you're navigating a subway or your schedule. **Published:** [[2025-07-30]] on [Idea Waypoints](https://ideawaypoints.substack.com/p/colour-makes-my-calendar-work-smarter) **Keywords:** [[Colour]], [[Fantastical]] **Reference:** N/A **Related:** [[2025-07-29 Atomic Essay|The Colour of Habit: How One Shade of Green Helps Me Show Up]] --- We see colour before we read. Colour is processed pre-attentively – our brains register it almost effortlessly. Text demands slower, more focused attention. This makes colour an essential tool in a wayfinding designer's tool kit, as it can create intuitive signals to help guide us through complex environments. It can also be a tool we use in our productivity and digital environments. Think about how colour acts as social cues in our environment. - **Red** shouts for your attention – used for fire alarms, stop signs, and reserved for emergency rooms at the hospital. - **Yellow** signals caution – like hazard stripes, or the black-and-yellow body of a wasp. (Ick.) - **Green** gives permission – go signs, open routes, safe operations. - **Blue** calms and guides – think of the blue square with a white "H" for hospitals, designed to be legible from a distance. Colour can provide us quick context, which is why I intentionally select colour for my calendar. It helps to reveal patterns and makes my time more visible to me. I wear many hats, which is why I prefer to use a calendar app that lets me view them all at the same time – or see only what I need for context. I use a multi-calendar setup in [Fantastical](https://notes.leahferguson.com/00+Meta/06+Tools/Fantastical) with many layered roles – designer, professor, person with a life – and colour helps me scan and plan my week in seconds. It's not about making things pretty. It's about designing for personal clarity. Here's how I use colour to make time visible – and why it can help. ## Colour as structure I've written before about [how I organize my digital life around a numbered file system – 00 to 99](https://ideawaypoints.substack.com/p/from-00-to-99-the-numbered-system), with my main focus areas on the 10s. That system isn't just for [folders in Obsidian](https://notes.leahferguson.com/00+Meta/04+SOP/File+Hierarchy+SOP). It extends to every app I use, including my calendar. I maintain multiple calendars: one for my personal life, one for each job, and sub-calendars beneath all for finer-grained planning. Colour gives me a way to make sense of it all at a glance. Each colour belongs to a cateogory (or at least I try my best to… there are some wrenches in my system, but contexts makes that clearer). Each category belongs with a number. The logic travels with me across time and tools. Here's what my calendar looks like in practice: ### 00 Meta → Neutrals This bucket is for background systems and invisible scaffolding. - **White** – Other people’s calendars. - I group these on a sub-calendar so I can toggle them on/off. I set their events to "free" so they don’t interfere with my availability but let me stay aware of key dates. - **Light grey** – Focus blocks, smart home automations, and even my city’s waste collection schedule. - If it’s infrastructural, it lives here—quiet, but essential. ### 10 Personal → Purple This is my catch-all for life outside of work. - **Purple** – The default me, basically. - Errands, appointments, reminders, random life admin. If I see purple, it's personal. - **Electric green** – Fitness. - It acts as a visual nudge across different elements, including my calendar. When I see a block of this green, it reminds me to move – especially when I don’t feel like it. [You can read more about that if you'd like.](https://ideawaypoints.substack.com/p/the-colour-of-habit-how-one-shade) ### 20 Learning → Yellow Everything related to formal or informal education. - **Yellow** – Grad school courses, self-paced online learning, conferences. - By keeping all education in one colour, I can see at a glance whether I’m prioritizing growth—or letting it slide. - I'm not saying it's my favourite colour and favourite area of my life… but my user profile picture *is* me in a yellow ball pit. You be the judge. ### 30 Professional → Greens. Kinda. Mostly. This is where things get more complex. I work multiple jobs, across multiple employer's calendar systems, and in environments that don’t always play nicely with colour logic. So I adapt. Outlook limits me with the available colours, but I still apply my framework as best I can: #### Main job: Designer Grey and two colours dominate the bulk of my calendar. When I see a lot of green, I know my production or focus time is going to be a problem. - **Light grey** – Focus blocks - **Dark green** – External or client-facing meetings. - **Light green** – Internal team meetings. The rest of my calendar feels a little bit like Skittles. Here, taste the rainbow: - **Dark blue** – Admin meetings and commitments I need to attend. - Also includes any unbillable overhead time. - **Light blue** – Admin meetings I can skip, or events that are nice to know about at the office. - No less important than external meetings. - **Orange** – Volunteer work with my professional association, or industry events. - I needed a visual break from all the cool tones, so orange stands out. - **Purple** – Time I’ve blocked off as unavailable during working hours. - This includes medical appointments, PTO, and when I have hard outs at the end of my time zone's work day. When you work with global teams, communicating these boundaries matters. - **Yellow** – My second job, teaching - I block off my teaching commitments (travel, class, faculty meetings) on my work calendar as separate than PTO. These hours wind up getting made up mornings or evenings during the week, which get blocked in as Focus. #### Second job: Professor - **Green** – Class time, prep time, faculty meetings… and marking time. - While I don't keep my main job's calendar visible in my personal calendar, I do for teaching. So, keeping it green as "professional" works fine for me. Yes, the inconsistency across platforms irks me. But clarity for _me_ matters more than harmony between systems. ### 60 Games → Blue Yes, I keep a full calendar for games planning. It's fun. We all need some fun in our lives. One thing I will say is that this *is* an important block on my calendar, and I treat it with the same commitment as I do other blocks on my calendar. If someone has taken the time to prep a game to GM, or come prepared as a player, I want to honour that and show up ready to roll. There are *always* laughs to be had at the table with friends – even if we're playing some delightful nordic folkloric horror game. (Maybe especially then?) This blue is different from my work blues. It’s not a faded-out task box—it’s a placeholder for joy. When I see a nice bright royal blue, it's time to roll some dice. --- ## Why It Works This isn’t a colour-coding system for the sake of pretty blocks on a grid. It’s a visual language for how I spend my time. - Grey = infrastructure - Purple = me - Yellow = learning - Green = movement or professional - Orange = community - Blue = play It’s not always perfect. But it’s consistent enough that my brain doesn’t need to recalibrate when I move from files to notes to calendar. I’ve built an internal logic that works across platforms, across roles, across time. This is what I mean when I say: **colour is design.** It’s not just decoration. It’s decision support. --- **Today's question:** Where in your day could colour reduce friction instead of adding noise? --- ## Original outline - How colour-coding calendars helps me see my day or week at a glance - Colour groupings like are groupings… - 00 Meta » Neutrals - Other people » White - Kept grouped on a sub-calendar so I can turn it off. - See other people's important things on my calendar, without impacting my availability (I set my availability as free) - Focus » Light grey - When I need to focus on a particular project, this allows me to schedule it as a big rock in my day. And hey, sometimes people at work even respect my calendar. Sometimes. - Waste Management » Light grey - Subscribed calendar from my muncipality for waste collection - Smart Home » Light grey - Still an experiment, but messing about with Home Assistant and automations. - 10 Personal » Purple (mostly) - General » Purple - Basically a big dumping of anything that doesn't fall in other calendars - Electric green » Fitness - When I'm coordinated enough to schedule my workouts. (Note: I need to be coordinated enough to schedule more workouts…) - This is thanks to Apple's branding and I use it as a visual nudge. - 20 Learning » Yellow - School » Yellow - Course calendar, meetings, deadlines - Online courses » Yellow - This is especially helpful if I'm doing some self-paced learning - 30 Professional » Varies - 34 Industry Association » Orange - I volunteer in my industry association. Orange was selected because I needed something different than blue, green or grey on my work calendar… - 35 My Main Employer - Colour selection in Microsoft Outlook is *terrible* for categories, so since this is a walled-garden calendar, I do have some that duplicate with my external colour planning - Admin » Blues - Light blue is for admin/overhead meetings that I don't need to attend - Dark blue is for admin/overhead meetings that I do need to attend - Meetings » Green - Light green is for internal meetings - Dark green is for external meetings - Personal » Purple - This covers PTO or appointments when I'm unavailable to be booked during regular office hours. Since I work on a team spread across multiple time zones, I will also block out when I have a hard out at my time zone's end of day since others don't always pay attention to time zones when booking… - 35 My Secondary Employer - I teach part time, so need to account for times I'm in the classroom or faculty meetings. - I vary differently between my personal calendar, and my employer's work calendar… and yes, it bothers me *but* I need a point of difference for myself for planning. - On my main company calendar, I use yellow (Learning). On my personal calendar setup, it's coloured green, since I only put early morning meetings on my personal calendar as a reminder when planning. - 60 Games » Blue - I like being able to see when I've got a game night (or afternoon) scheduled with friends. I limit this one specifical to narrative tabletop roleplaying games (think *Dungeons & Dragons*, except I play a dozen other systems…)