David Seah - Compact Calendar
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Bookmark History
Saved by 42 people (-15 private), first by anonymouse user on 2007-12-01
- Babellibros on 2009-08-16 - Tags organizer , paper , calendar , lifehack
- Eatmytag on 2009-07-05 - Tags davidseah , calendar , excel , xls , print
- Devinw on 2009-05-07 - Tags calendar , productivity , gtd , tools , organization
- Johnmon on 2009-04-25 - Tags calendar , Productivity_Tools
- Dalepike on 2009-03-21 - Tags Productivity , Work
Public Sticky notes
This is the new Compact Calendar home page, which you can bookmark as http://davidseah.com/page/compact-calendar. I've made some small updates to the calendar to make it easier to update, and have added ISO 8660 week numbers to the "day starting on monday" version of the calendar.
» Impatient people: skip to 2008 COMPACT CALENDAR DOWNLOAD
About the Compact Calendar
I find myself doing more project planning these days, so I dusted off my old compact calendar from several years ago. It's just a simple printable calendar, packaged like a candy bar o' time, but the design justification runs more deeply than you might think.
The Candy Bar Theory of Calendar Design
Compact Calendar Sheet
I evolved this technique while still working at ActiveEdge, when I was doing a lot of on-the-fly estimating for proposals and production. The problem with traditional calendar design is that they chunk time in months, not continuous days. I generally am thinking of things like:
* How many days are available, including weekends?
* When are critical deliverables?
* How much calendar time is needed to finish a task?
* What are the specific days we have to work around?
One way to do this is to use a long timeline, like a Gantt chart. All the days line up one after the other in a long horizontal format, which makes it easy to see how long something takes; distance is directly equatable to duration. The drawback of the Gantt chart is its lack of compactness.
How To Use the Compact Calendar
Download the Microsoft Excel templates (they are .XLT files) and double-click them to open. If you're using a Mac, you may have to open them manually from Excel. Select the "Calendar" worksheet and print it out. If you don't need the entire date range, you may also select just a few rows; just make sure you choose "print selection" from Excel's print dialog box.
When I'm doing impromptu planning, I just circle dates and underline ranges, writing notes in the empty space on the right. I
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Public Comment
on 2008-01-31 by jeanmichelg