“What to make that’s quick,” I thought to myself as I faced another day of product-making. I have a lot of ideas, but I’m finding that some of them require more preparation than I think I want to spend. I’m averaging about 3-4 hours total on these daily product bursts: about 90 minutes for the actual design work, then another 90 minutes for creating the package, attendant screenshot, and writing the post itself. So today, I figured I would save some time by revisiting my old Text Strip Calendar from 2007. This was based on a calendar I used to put in my planning text file so it would be always visible when I was typing. I also used to tape a printout on the bottom of my monitor for easy reference.

Unlike most horizontal strip calendars I’ve seen, this is more like a number line than a bunch of traditional month-based blocks, so it’s a bit truer in spirit to the “candybar of time” Compact Calendar; I guess you could call this one a “licorice strip”. It would be cool to make a spool mechanism and have a calendar you could unroll. That might be a fun novelty product for the future, if I could figure out how to make it.

As it turned out, making this text strip calendar took longer than planned…nearly two hours! There were fonts to test for legibility when printed, and I ended up having to manually enter-and-format the data because what I got out of Excel was too cumbersome to reformat. I also added some registration marks so it would be easier to use a cutter to make the strips. But here it is!

» Download Horizontal Calendar Strips (US Letter)

Adobe Acrobat Reader is recommended for printing. The built-in "Mac OS X Preview" and "Chrome Browser" PDF viewers do not always draw dotted lines correctly.

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Enjoy!

Today’s product grew out of my kickoff post for Groundhog Day Resolutions. Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, if there was a handy instruction sheet for people to download? Especially if I could make it really fast using Brad’s groundhog clipart?

As it went, it took about 90 minutes to lay this out, and another 15 minutes to make the graphic above by adapting the template I made yesterday so I can easily drop it in. The primer itself uses a bit of the graphic styling from the collectable PDF graphic I made for the donation button, so I saved some time there. Still, I had to make the calendar and come up with the copy.

While I don’t think I can sell this by itself, I could see it being part of another product. It would be great as an addition to the 365-Day ETP Almanac, for example. Or this could be part of a more polished Groundhog Day Resolutions kit or book. Who knows? I’ll review in March to see what I have.

In the meantime, grab it now and print it out, if you’d like to follow along with Groundhog Day Resolutions this year. While it’s only available in US Letter size, it should scale-to-fit very well when printing A4.

» Download Groundhog Day Resolutions Primer (US Letter)

Adobe Acrobat Reader is recommended for printing. The built-in "Mac OS X Preview" and "Chrome Browser" PDF viewers do not always draw dotted lines correctly.

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Enjoy!

There once was a form called The Plain Old 5 Day Planner, showing 5 days of the week using the schedule grid from the Emergent Task Planner. I didn’t think that it would be very interesting, but I needed one for some planning and posted it anyway.

Not hearing anything from anyone, I stopped updating it in 2010. It turns out a few people were using it, and someone asked if there was some way to fit 7 days on it. “That’s crazy talk!” I thought. “There’s no way I could fit 7 days on a sheet and have it be usable at all!” That may be the case, but I tried it anyway. Who knows…maybe it will work!

The new 7 Day Planner is available now for the first time in color, with all 7 days fitting on a single sheet. I dropped the note column to make that work. Unlike the other forms, I didn’t make this a write-in-the-date style form. If this omission fills you with rage, ya better leave a comment :-)

» Download 7 Day Planner (US Letter)
» Download 7 Day Planner (A4 ISO)

Adobe Acrobat Reader is recommended for printing. The built-in "Mac OS X Preview" and "Chrome Browser" PDF viewers do not always draw dotted lines correctly.

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Enjoy!