The redundant pages in paper calendars

Usually my writing style on here is me laying down the law ex cathedra but every now and then I’m not so sure and I get into more of an aimless causerie like these musings on how my paper calendar is both too cluttered and too empty:

On digital calendars you can often shift between day views, week views, month views etc and it’ll show relevant information.

Paper calendars sometimes come with multiple views, too.

I have a paper calendar now (the brand is "Hobonichi Weeks") where the main view is a weeks view with big cells for each day, and a notes page next to each week. That format suits me perfectly, I can write in my schedule for each day and on the notes page I can write “to do” items.

But there’s also a li’l monthly calendar in the corner of each page. “Great”, I thought, “I can circle important dates”. Although I often end up forgetting to do that, + it’s pretty useless the last week of each month since it only shows the current month.

There’s also a whole spread per month with a couple of lines of space for each day.

And one spread for the entire year with a tiny cell per day which also has seven extra freely assignable cells for each month (perhaps for a weekly schedule). Each month is one column and each day is a row in the column in a 12✕31 grid.

There are also a second yearly calendar in the front with just a tiny digit for each day (and it also has last year and next year), and also a 365 habit check-off sheet in the back. (Should've been 366 days since 2024 was a leap year 🤦🏻‍♀️.)

And a “My 100” check list in the back which I forgot to use for anything and now have put a couple of books in since I was running out of space in the “my favorite books” section. In hindsight the “My 100” area seems great for the GTD project list, I’ll use it for that next year. Although I’m not sure I really wanna do 100 things.

So my first impression when faced with this—not in this particular calendar, don’t worry, this isn’t the first time I’m seeing a paper calendar—my first impression when first seeing it was “Is the idea that I’m supposed to write everything in the monthly view and in the weekly view?”

I can see how that would have some advantages since you could plan differently and with different granularity or see different things. But copying everything over is also error prone and time consuming.

The other approach would be to use them for different things. The monthly view for planning and the weekly view for diary notes, for example.

What I do is I use the monthly view for everything related to food, eating, cooking, grocery shopping; and I use blue ink for diary notes of what I did eat (if I forgot to plan or strayed from the plan) and black for what I plan to eat (and just checking it off if it comes to pass). I’ve been pretty sloppy about doing this well and it’s often mostly blank.

I then do everything else in the weekly view. Same deal: black ink for plans & checking off plans, blue for diary notes and feelings or stuff that happened. Here I’m a li’l more careful so plans more often just straight-forwardly get checked off.

Then to the dumb part: I redundantly put stuff that really belong in the week view, I put that in the yearly view too. It just fits one word per day so sometimes that’s an upcoming appointment, other times it’s a diary word. If I could consistently know that I was doing good at keeping these two views synced, this would be pretty great for planning. Like if someone were like “can you find two weeks this year that you’re not booked?” I could look in the yearly section. Putting some feels on otherwise empty days is also good for when I look back over the year.

But that consistent copying ability is a pretty big “if”. I often mess up. I’m gonna keep trying a little while longer, since I’m noticing that I’m messing this up less and less the more I practice, but a more foolproof approach would’ve been to just non-redundantly use it for something else. A habit, a writing plan, I dunno. For now I’m gonna stick to the plan: food stuff goes in monthly, rest of life goes in weekly and redundantly summarized on yearly.

Maybe if I try to figure out some actual routines and habits around this, it’ll get better.

PDA vs books

GTD basics

Now