Back to School Tech Tips: Calendar Organization and Future-Planning

This article is the second of four articles in regard to how to set up your new debate season and back-to-school experience for success. You can find part 1 at the link here. Look at our website tomorrow to read our next article in this series. 

These tips are generally specific to Google Calendar, but generally speaking, all these tips ought to be equally useful for other calendar apps such as Apple Calendar or the in-built calendar in Outlook. If you are not using Google Calendar, do not fret about the specifics related to Google Calendar. Look up whether there is an equivalent for your particular calendar manager or online personal planner, and then read the article to learn how to integrate these features to make debate easier as applicable

Why Use a Calendar for Debate?

Remember that your win/loss percentage is more than a mere function of your argumentative ability and raw speaking talent. Routinely, when debaters describe being “judge screwed” or aff/neg side bias, this is often a coping mechanism to avoid acknowledging the fact they were ill-prepared in terms of file prep and pre-tournament scouting and/or they're lacking the skill. 

In any game with some randomness (i.e. random draw for poker hands) or uneven side advantages (i.e. first mover advantage in chess), those games sometimes unpredictably advantage one side over another. As a result, inevitably some players' starting circumstances will make it less likely for them to win based on the procedural conditions. The mere fact a game is designed to not be perfectly fair does not prove the game is one of pure chance like slots or roulette. Fundamentally, debate is a game of skill in which randomness (i.e. judging quality) and side disadvantages (i.e. first/last speaker for the aff or 1AR time pressures difficulties for the neg), are game elements. In game design theory, think of the game as (semi)perfectly imbalanced, in which the uneven advantages and disadvantages improve the quality of the game. If you’re interested in game theory explanations of how an imbalanced game is not a bad game, concepts useful to understand for higher-level theory argumentation about fairness impacts, see a video explanation linked here.

Analogous to how good poker players consistently win even with bad cards due to their raw skill, good debaters consistently break to out rounds and finals despite unfortunate circumstances and the imperfect balance of debate. This is due to their pre-tournament prep with card cutting, scouting, and practice speeches, all of which are more likely to happen with good pre-tournament time allocation and scheduling

Pre-Tournament Prep Example

Let’s take a hypothetical tournament using the new Sept-Oct topic as an example. This tournament takes place on the 8th of September, and today’s date is 08-26, meaning all tournament participants have ~12 days to prepare for the new topic and for the competition at that specific tournament. 

Note first, that merely because all competitors have the same raw time available doesn’t mean that they’ll all equally prep for that same period of time. There are structural disadvantages external to the activity, such as a part time job, college applications, or care work for relatives/younger siblings, all of which often increase time pressures for pre-tournament prep. Similarly, not all debaters have access to the same private resources like briefs, allowing debaters with higher family wealth levels to buy-out some of their research obligations to third parties. Structural unfairness implicates the procedural fairness of the activity, disadvantaging poorer debaters who have additional obligations outside debate or an inability to afford briefs by decreasing their time available to prep compared to others. 

You may have heard the phrase that “everyone has the same 24 hours [a day].” This is analogous to a simplistic view of the raw hours available for pre-tournament prep, as both are equally wrong. Our circumstances obviously limit our time available for debate, meaning that people with better circumstances are more likely to do well at debate. Of course, this is profoundly unfair given that highly-skilled debaters ought to win irrespective of circumstances, but nonetheless that is simply how the world works. Non-profits like Kankee Briefs seeking to mitigate those inequities can help, but this is a fact we must consider when doing pre-tournament prep scheduling.

To simplify the math, in the hypothetical tournament example, ignore everything argued in the above two paragraphs about how the raw number of 12 days of time before the tournament should not be equated to being the same as everyone equally having 12 days available for pre-tournament prep. Obviously be aware of it, as the practical, real-world considerations mean our hypothetical is less accurate, but including it would overcomplicate the model. Regardless, let’s take the bare-bones minimum prep standard for LD, which is having one aff constructive, one neg constructive, and possibly some generic 1NR cards to refute the 1AC. Obviously this is not ideal, but of course doing the least amount of work possible is not an ideal situation. 

Subdividing your timeframe by your three tasks means you’ll need to complete each task within 4 days. Any delays for one task means your topic prep schedule is behind, necessitating trade-offs with potential prep time for your other topic-prep obligations. Finalizing an aff constructive late means less time to work on your neg constructive and 1NR blocks, meaning both of these will be inferior to the ideal case you would have otherwise produced. 

These numbers are obviously contrived and are not necessarily applicable to your situation, but often the turnaround time in-between some tournaments would make the 12 day prep period described above seem like an eternity. This also is not calculating in time for practice debates, speaking drills, 1AR/2AR and 2NR extensions, carded 1AR answers to neg arguments, a variety of neg positions to better answer different types of affs and aff contention, etc., all of which add pressure on time and labor effort available. The effort required to thoroughly prepare a topic, especially at a competitive and/or circuit debate level, is immense, which means that bad time management can be a key source of you losing debates. 

Overview of Sub-Calendars

A powerful feature in Google Calendar is the creation of sub-categories of calendars as seen under the  "my calendars" section or the "other calendars" section, which you’ll see if you share a calendar with other people. As opposed to simply adding every  to-do list item, debate event, and/or due dates on your calendar haphazardly, organizing your calendar into distinct sub-calendars adds a lot more flexibility and understandability to allow you to selectively view what you want to see on your calendar based on its relevancy. 

For instance, I have ~10 personal calendars in Google Calendar, including, but not limited to the personal calendars for birthdays, holidays, my class schedule (for synchronous classes), homework due dates (one calendar per class), and extraneous tasks, as well as shared calendars like my family calendar, friends’ work schedules, and an apartment event calendar. Obviously, showing all calendars all the time produces a barely usable mess; you don't need nor want to see all these calendars all the time. For several calendars, I only turn them on when they are pertinent to me or the thing I am actively working on.

Let’s take a real-world, non-debate example. It will not be immediately applicable to you, but is still worthwhile knowing both for understanding the usefulness of toggleable calendars as well as improving your professional life after high-school. On a professional level, a common practice in workplaces is to have everyone's calendars partially open to everyone else in the organization. Because I know when someone is at the office or is attending an event/meeting throughout the week, I know what times are good or bad to talk with them about issues (i.e. not calling someone during a team meeting). Normally, this info is superfluous, and it is not necessary to see the work schedule for everyone, but when it is needed, the scheduling info that is normally hidden in the background can be accessed by toggling that specific calendar on/off. 

Of course, most of you perusing a website entirely about high-school debate, for obvious reasons, are remarkably unlikely to have 9-5 office/white-collar jobs that necessitate scheduling meetings and avoiding calendar conflicts, but these are good examples showing the value of distinct, toggleable calendars compared to a single, unified, all-encompassing calendar that causes information overloading by showing all possible information (not merely what you want to know). If all else fails and you find reading this article to be of little value to your debate career, treat this newfound knowledge as a portable skill useful for endeavors like future employment.

Helpfulness for Debate - Shared Tournament and Topic Release Schedule Calendars

How is this info useful for debate? A go-to example is a shareable tournament calendar, managed by team leadership, which indicates what tournaments the team is attending. It also can note the relevant practice debate, sign-up, payment, drop, and competition dates. Normally, without a team tournament calendar, a debater will need to possibly include all these dates in their calendar, which leads to potential miscommunications and missed deadlines. If your team leadership has shared a calendar with all their debaters, then everyone can be automatically updated of any changes to the tournament schedule.

Consider an event-specific shareable calendar noting the topic release schedule for PF or LD. For decades, the NSDA topic commission has followed a generally consistent schedule for new topics to be released on the first of the month every 1-2 months (depending on the event), meaning you should have a reminder that repeats each year in order for you to check out the new LD topic on the first of August, October, December, and February. The Sept-Oct, Nov-Dec, Jan-Feb, and Mar-Apr topics always release on the first of the month before the topic will be debated, so adding a reminder ensures you’ll be less likely to forget about the release of new topics. 

For experienced debaters and coaches, this potentially sounds silly and perhaps pointless, as the topic release schedule is ingrained and embedded in your mind as a result of past experience. However, inevitably some non-negligible number of novices and/or JV debaters won’t remember to prep the new topic given the fact they’re perhaps unaware of a new topic existing. Of course, when coaching or leading students, you don’t want their debate experience to be on rails and full of hand-holding, but many novice and JV debaters are youthful and are perhaps unaware of the time and workload pressures of competitive debate. For many debate events, enrollment has been consistently dropping for years, so it is worthwhile to lower potential barriers to entry for novice and JV debaters by helping ensure that their experience climbing the ladder to varsity-level debate is as smooth as possible.

On top of the topic release reminders, I would add off-month reminders on the first of September, November, January, and March, which are the dates when topic debate periods officially begin. With resolution-specific debates comes resolution-specific evidence for scouting and potential card dredging on the OpenCaselist wiki, particularly for debate events with good disclosure norms. This advice is less applicable for PF (post-round wiki disclosure is generally still not a commonplace practice) and policy (as the topic is the same throughout the whole year). However, for LD, with its ~4-6 topics (depending on your potential participation in NCFL and NSDA nationals) and somewhat good disclosure norms, Wiki scouting reminders are extremely useful for greater familiarity with your potential opponent’s arguments as well as aiding the creation of answer-to files/blocks.

Helpfulness for Debate - Calendar Reminders for Pre-Tournament Prep

Use a calendar with in-built reminders to remind you of your pre-tournament prep obligations. A sub-calendar can be set up so that every event in that sub-calendar will automatically send phone notifications or email reminders. This can be before a specified period before a task is due, like the day before, a few days before, or a week before, in order to remind you to work on the upcoming task. A good example is the due date for finalizing a 1AC before a team practice debate—because of the reputational consequences and a loss of an opportunity to develop your debate skills, an extra reminder notifying you of your obligation the day before the due date is very useful in order for you to finalize everything and be aware of the upcoming deadline. Because of the sub-categorizing of calendars, we can set up our calendars that include our high priority tasks to have as many reminders as you need, while the low-priority tasks possibly don’t need to have any reminders. 

This is extremely useful for people who hate routinely looking at calendars day-in and day-out, week after week, as you have set up your calendar to be an active reminder about events and due dates as opposed to being a passive repository of information in which you need to remember to look at your calendar.

Conclusion

The person most responsible for your success or failure in debate is not the judge pool, the topic selection process, or potential side bias, it’s you. Your strategy to get to finals cannot be hoping for good judging—it must be prepping and practicing to levels sufficient to mitigate the impact of bad luck. Absent extenuating structural circumstances, you must develop a system to consistently remind yourself day-in and day-out of what needs to be done to avoid missing deadlines and being unprepared for debate tournaments. If you miss a deadline or are unaware of a topic change because of not being notified of it, don’t hold out hope that you’ll remember next time. If you’re consistently procrastinating, and by extension producing sub-par tournament prep that you’re not proud of, don’t think that you’ll do better next time unless you’re doing something material to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Both of these issues are somewhat solvable via using technology to plan ahead and prevent the problem by automatically solving the problem of an overburdened mental load.

Your standard for pre-tournament prep ought not be whatever the bare minimum amount of cards to fill the 1AC and 1NC. You’ll obviously need blocks and perhaps pre-written extensions of constructive arguments. You need to plan winning 2AR and 2NR strategies, carefully crafting your constructives to set yourself up for success in later speeches. For aff, think of the core neg arguments and how your 1AC preemptively turns those arguments to make it harder for the neg to win offense. For neg, you need multiple off-case positions for 1NC contentions to be tailored towards that particular aff, as a catch-all 1NC you use for every round is not a winning strategy. You need to scout every potential competitor at a tournament and prepare files as needed to specifically address their arguments, including (at a bare-minimum) blocks, but also new affs or off-case positions that better address that specific aff or neg. Don’t hedge your bets on topicality being the end-all be-all answer to plan affs that skirt the line of being topical—write case answers and new off-case positions to answer that aff, especially if they’re a good team.

Going above and beyond the minimum standard and being set up for success requires thorough pre-tournament prep, strategizing, and skill development. If you aren’t doing the steps described above, you’re doing yourself a disservice and putting yourself at a disadvantage compared to those teams that do. 

The best possible method to improve your debate success is making a plan for how you will be successful. Set up reminders and make a schedule to plan time for all steps to make sure you’re not unprepared. For debaters earlier in their career, this seems like a lot to think about, and it's easy to get overwhelmed by the prospect of moving beyond reading a few blocks and making exactly one 1AC and one 1NC. 

Similar to how we flow in order to keep track of all the arguments we need to address, a calendar is also a differently formatted to-do list. Analogous to how dropping arguments is a recipe for losing debates, not meeting your pre-tournament prep obligations is setting yourself up for failure before you even step foot on the tournament grounds. On a meta-level, not tracking what you need to do with a calendar is the equivalent of not flowing and hoping you won’t drop an argument. Remember the recommendations from F1 film: “Hope is not a strategy,” you must “create your own [lucky] breaks.”