Compact Calendar
Official Compact Calendar Page: http://davidseah.com/page/compact-calendar
About the Compact Calendar
Updated 2009 Calendar (USA and other contributors) Now Available!
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 created using Excel's date functions and presented like a candy bar o' time, but the design justification runs more deeply than you might think.
» Impatient people: skip to 2008/2009 COMPACT CALENDAR DOWNLOAD
The Candy Bar Theory of Calendar Design
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. It is basically a form of doodling your schedule. I find it's a great planning tool in meetings too; just whip out a few of these sheets out at a client meeting to do a quick thumbnail schedule on-the-spot.
The advantages of the Compact Calendar:
The days are all packed together visually, so "distance" corresponds directly to time. This makes visually estimating how much time you need much easier, an visual advantage shared with the Gantt chart.
The calendar for an entire year can fit on a single piece of paper, with plenty of room for notes. You can also just print out a section of it, for short projects.
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.
Saturdays and Sundays are shaded differently, so we are not as tempted to plan our work schedule on them.
It's easy to count weeks too. "Unit weeks" tend to be the building blocks of longer-term projects.
You're forced to break up project tasks to fit into each 5-day work period. Gantt charts, by comparison, tend to draw long lines through the weekend because that's what lines want to do. Even if you don't work on the weekend, from a visual perspective it seems to imply that you should be working. This has always bugged me, from the perspective of visual gestalt and information design.
Because we retain the days of the week in the same column, it's easy to mark recurring events that are tied to them. "Oh, every Friday we have a company meeting." Easy to see where they'll be; not so on the Gantt chart.
The main drawback of the Compact Calendar is that you can't easily show dependencies or overlapping tasks. It's also not so good for detailed planning. For those cases, I would use my Excel spreadsheet version of the Gantt chart, which is much prettier than the ones that come out of Microsoft Project.
Another drawback of this approach is that it's hard to shift tasks around, but you know what? Project is terrible at that too; it's a glorified outliner with pretensions toward being a resource allocation tool, and it isn't very competent in either role. To be fair, I haven't looked at the more recent versions of Project. I have a license of it that I should install to see how it's evolved...but I digress.
Printing the Compact Calendar
It's an Excel spreadsheet template. Unzip CompactCalendar.zip and double-click the resulting CompactCalendar.xlt file to open a new copy of it.
Then print it out as-is. I keep a few printouts handy in case I need to do some on-the-fly planning. I will then go back and make an "official" version for distribution.
Anyway, there's three worksheets in the Excel file: Instructions, Calendar, and Tables. Usage notes are written in the Instructions sheet for your reference. Calendar is the actual sheet itself, and Tables contains the Holiday Lookup Table that highlights the right days in the Calendar sheet.
If you'd like to modify the calendar, download the latest year (2009). It's much easier than before:
If you need to change the year, just modify the year at the upper right of the blue calendar header. In other words, change 2009 to 2010 or whatever year. Thanks to the help of several readers, the calendar will automagically reformat.
You can add holidays to the HolidayTable on the
Tablesworksheet. This table is an Excel Named Range, so make sure that if you expand the table, you redefine the range. If you change the year, you'll have to change the holidays in this table too.There are two conditional formats in use: one that makes the background of the day blue for the first day of the month, and another that makes the day number itself bold and blue for holidays in the Holiday Table.
If you don't need the entire year, you can select the range of rows you want, then when you print check "Selection" in the "Print What" part of the Print dialog box. The headers will print automatically at the top of the sheet, and it will also print a little larger. Useful for shorter projects.
Compact Calendar Workflow
Here's an example of the calendar in use...click the photo to zoom in!
In general, I use printouts as a thinking calendar, doodling in estimated times and circling dates, dependencies, and deliverables. You can see how I use lines to connect with the notes on the right side of the paper.
At client meetings I can use the calendar to note other dependencies, deliverables, and ask about company meetings and other potential conflicts like vacations. It's a lot easier to pass the sheet around than a laptop; people can contemplate paper more easily.
After I get things worked out, I will sometimes make a "clean" version of the schedule using a new sheet and give it to the client to photocopy.
When I'm managing other people in person, sometimes I'll use the Compact Calendar to quickly note their deliverables and the dates on this sheet. I'll also sometimes point out dependencies, and then they have this sheet they can just stick up on the wall and follow. I find that people just need to know when something is due so they can tackle the work; if they have to read a detailed spec or the proposal to find this critical information just slows things down. Specifics of course matter, but that's a post for another day.
Download the Calendar Template
INSTRUCTIONS
Download using the link below, unzip the archive. In the
Excelfolder, you'll see files named something likeCompactCalendar.xlt. This is a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet template.Double-click the file (Windows) and a new spreadsheet will be created based on the template.
Print it out, or annotate the calendar within Excel. Again, I just print them out; you could make a fancier "production calendar" too and print that instead, if you're that type of person.
Optionally you can copy the
.xltfile into your Microsoft Excel templates folder. This gives you the ability to create new calendars using Excel's New Document command.
US Version
Download USA 2008 by Dave Seah
Includes Sun-Sat and Mon-Sun (w/ ISO8601 week numbers) versions in ZIP archive. You can also download the PDF Sun-Sat and PDF Mon-Sun versions too!
Download USA 2009 by Dave Seah
Includes Sun-Sat and Mon-Sun (w/ ISO8601 week numbers) versions in ZIP archive. You can also download the PDF Sun-Sat and PDF Mon-Sun versions too!
2009 International Calendars
If you've made a version of the Compact Calendar for your locale and would like to share, put it on a page on your own website and I'll link it here! I no longer host other people's files, because it puts the support burden on me to maintain them.
Austria 2009 by Ronald
Canada 2009 by andryou
Germany 2009 by Lennart Groetzbach
Greece 2009 by Gerasimos Tsiamalos
Italy 2009 by Luca Magnani
Japan 2009 by Yoshiomi KURISU
Romania 2009 by Andrei Neculau
Slovakia 2009 by Uzivatel
Sweden 2009 by David Fredin
United Kingdom 2009 by gregnbaker.com (box-net download, unchecked)
2008 International Calendars
Argentina 2008 via Jeroen Sangers
Australia 2008 by Seth Yates
Australia 2008 (by State) by Leah Maclean
Belgium (NL) 2008 by Tijl Kindt
Brazil 2008 by Nicholas Almeida (w/ São Paulo holidays too)
Brazil 2008 by Carla do Brasil
Canada - Alberta 2008 by "Dave"
Canada - British Columbia 2008 by Canuck
Chile 2008 via Jeroen Sangers
China (PRC) 2008 byiWorm
Colombia 2008 via Jeroen Sangers
Colombia 2008 by Javier Ferrand
Czech Republic 2008 by arnarey
Denmark 2008 by Henrik Fylking-Nielsen
Ecuador 2008 by timoleon
Ecuador 2008 via Jeroen Sangers
Fiji 2008 by Neil Krish Goundar
France 2008 by Le TisseurDeToile
Ghana 2008 via Sebastian Spier
Guatemala 2008 via Jeroen Sangers
Germany 2008 by Lennart Groetzbach
Hungary 2008 by Zoltan Till
India 2008 by Shikhar
India 2008 by Venkat Mangudi
Indonesia 2008 by Eka
Italy 2008 by Luca Magnani
Italy 2008 w/ ISO 8601 Weeks by Paolo Ciarrocchi
Italy 2008 w/ week column by Alexander Reif
Japan 2008 by Yoshiomi KURISU
Korea 2008 by Hyun-soo Lee
Korea 2008 by Malbong
Malaysia 2008 by Fredy
Mexico 2008 via Jeroen Sangers
The Netherlands 2008 by Piter plus Frisian version
New Zealand 2008 by Big Nosed Ugly Guy
Norway 2008 by Jorunn
Norway 2008 by Vidar G.
Norway 2008 by Ole
Poland 2008 by Poweruser
Portugal 2008 by Miguel Alho
Romania 2008 by Andrei Neculau
Singapore 2008 by Chew LH
Slovenia 2008 by Kajote
South Africa 2008 by Jason Bagley
Spain 2008 by Jeroen Sangers
Sweden 2008 by Jim Carlberg
Switzerland 2008 by Claude Knaus
Taiwan 2008 by E. Sheng
Thailand 2008 by David Mould
Turkey 2008 by Dokur
United Kingdom 2008 Bank Holidays (English) by headphonaught
If you don't see your country listed here, you might check the old 2007 listing, or check back later. If you have made a version, let me know! :-)
OTHER VERSIONS
- "Michael" has created an Apple iWork Numbers Template Version on his template solutions site.
- Yoshiomi KURISU has programmed an online Compact Calendar Creator that will even create PDFs. Very cool!
OTHER TOOLS
You can find more printable productivity tools on The Printable CEO™ Series page.
