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In general, I use printouts as a thinking calendar, doodling in estimated times and circling dates, dependencies, and deliverables. Here’s an example of the calendar in use…click the photo to zoom in!

For example, I sometimes use my Excel spreadsheet version of the Gantt chart, which is much prettier than the ones that come out of Microsoft Project. It’s also not so good for detailed planning, but you probably would use other tools for that. The main drawback of the Compact Calendar is that you can’t easily show dependencies or overlapping tasks. “Oh, every Friday we have a company meeting.” Easy to see where they’ll be not so on the Gantt chart.

Because we retain the days of the week in the same column, it’s easy to mark recurring events that are tied to them.

This has always bugged me, from the perspective of visual gestalt and information design. Even if you don’t work on the weekend, from a visual perspective it seems to imply that you should be working. Gantt charts, by comparison, tend to draw long lines through the weekend because that’s what lines want to do.

You’re forced to break up project tasks to fit into each 5-day work period.

“Unit weeks” tend to be the building blocks of longer-term projects.

Saturdays and Sundays are shaded differently, so we are not as tempted to plan our work schedule on them.

It still largely retains the monthly calendar format, with days of the week in columns, so it’s a bit easier to use than a Gantt chart.

You can also just print out a section of it, for short projects, by using the “print selection” feature of Excel and it should retain the headers.

The calendar for an entire year can fit on a single piece of paper, with plenty of room for notes.

This makes visually estimating how much time you need much easier, an visual advantage shared with the Gantt chart.

The days are all packed together visually, so “distance” corresponds directly to time.

It’s a great planning tool to whip out during a meeting, so I try to keep a few printouts of this spreadsheet handy to do a quick thumbnail schedule on-the-spot. It is basically a form of doodling your schedule. When I’m doing impromptu planning by myself, I just circle dates and underline ranges, writing notes in the empty space on the right. While in meetings, I can quickly block out chunks of time for an entire year, marking important days and making detailed notes on deliverables as we’re talking this provides the starting point for future detailed planning. In general, we’re trying to fit our tasks into continuous days of work that cross month boundaries by running all the days together, we can maintain that sense of continuity and still not lose track of what month it is. The Compact Calendar, by comparison, is great for representing a schedule compactly while maintaining the important context of weekends and holidays. This is great in theory, but the Gantt chart lacks compactness and is cumbersome to use because you can’t see everything at once. 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. One way to do this is to use a long timeline, like a Gantt chart.

What are the specific days we have to work around?.

How much calendar time is needed to finish a task?.

How many days are available, including weekends?.

When I’m planning, I am trying to answer questions like: The problem with traditional calendar design is that they chunk time in months, not continuous days. I used to do a lot of on-the-fly estimating for proposals and production at various web agencies.

This would be a useful feature, particularly for schedules that don’t start on January 1st. Missing in this release is the “start any day of the year” support that a reader submitted a few months ago.

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This year’s update adds improved first day of month highlighting (thanks Gregor Erbach) and automatically-calculated holidays, so now it’s even easier to update the calendar every year. I pre-print the sheets and use them for “sketching schedules” in group meetings these notes then become the basis for working up more detailed planning.

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(Impatient people can skip to 2010 COMPACT CALENDAR DOWNLOAD :-)įor those of you new to the Compact Calendar, it’s just a simple printable calendar created using Microsoft Excel’s date calculation functions and presented like a candy bar o’ time.

The Compact Calendar is a printable calendar based on an Excel spreadsheet, designed to be easy to use in impromptu planning by yourself or with a group of people.

For the 2011 version of the Compact Calendar, please go to