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by gorgoiler 929 days ago
Like a lot of calendars, this has a big focus on months yet the only monthly schedules I have are passive and operate in the background: salary in, bills out.

When it comes to organising my life the cycle of week to week planning is by far the most important one. Where we are in that cycle at any given moment in time — what day of the week it is — is much more important than knowing the current month. Shopping for food, planning vacations, the school year, meetings, socialising — all happen per week or over the course of weeks, and never per month or over the course of months.

The challenge then is to produce a calendar where the months are as incidental as the phase of the moon or the numeric value of current day, and where the focus is on the shape of the week and the space, in weeks, between events and date ranges. (Ironically, weeks and lunar cycles are closely related, so it might actually be cool/fun/unique to focus on lunar cycles while pivoting to a week-on-week format.)

What is the best calendar shape that handles this?

(The site that you’ve built around the calendar is superbly executed btw.)

7 comments

One size does not fit all. For planning and reflecting on life events, weekly is immensely useful over monthly.

My goto calendar is a letter size page (landscape oriented) with 5 columns.

One column for each week. One page per month. Dates/SMTWTFS go on top row.

Each column (week) gets agenda style entries. pseudo ordered. with just the date and events.

My usecase is primarily logging life events after the fact for reflection and self improvement than planning the future.

This format scales well, needs just pen and paper (no printer, i just draw the lines and put the start of the week day/date per column).

Low pressure, a year is captured in 12 pages. I reviewa very rarely but its there when I need and I can eyeball my way down the calendar without any search capabilities.

I split the page into top half for personal and bottom half for work.

It just works.

Google calendar in the 4-week view has always been my choice for this. A two-week view with some more detail per day would be even better, I think.
I'm experimenting with printable, 2-week calendars, which contains space for adding retrospective items throughout the week. I'd like to add weekly recurring items to it, would like to keep the overall appearance clean - making it easy to write on it.

I'd love your feedback and ideas to improve it.

https://jonathan.rogivue.net/tools/2-week-calendar/2-Week%20...

(I'm happy to share the design files - Affinity Designer & SVG)

I was looking for the same as this. I wanted a yearly overview where the emphasis was on weeks so I could plan vacations and the school year. I ended up creating a pet project to do exactly this that may be of use to you. I’m interested in your thoughts? https://calii.tiimo.app/
Not sure about calendar shape but obsidian has weekly notes you can use to structure and plan your weeks.

Visually for me it would be a vertical list that starts from Monday to Sunday.

https://github.com/liamcain/obsidian-periodic-notes

do you have any sketch of how this could look like? I'd be happy to build it! and thank you, it's still very early version though
I'm 100% sure I saw a calendar that was 7 columns as days, 52 rows as weeks, every day was just a number, no borders or anything, months were separated with a line and every first day of month was with a shade/gradient. It was only on the left third/quarter of a vertical paper so the right part was left for notes.