So it goes without saying that we all use calendars. You don’t have to be a Resident Engineer or a Construction Project Manager to grasp the concept – Simply being a human being requires you to use a calendar.
Sometimes, my articles will have a long lead-in story, or a few thought-provokers to get you into the article.
This one doesn’t really need an introduction like that.
I’ve got a couple of calendar formats that I use all the time. Each has its own purpose in my arsenal of tools. I thought I’d share them here on the site, for a few reasons:
1. I think they are cool formats. I use both of them constantly.
2. I found one of them about 10 years ago on a popular Excel-based website. I built the other one myself.
3. I wanted to house them here on Hildebranski.com so that, when I need them again, I can pull them down a lot quicker than trying to comb my way through Explorer to find them on my hard drive. (I can be selfish, it’s my site, right…??)
Let’s take a look at them.
Year at a Glance
I found this format on Vertex42.com a long time ago. It’s a great website if you are into Excel-based forms & spreadsheets. I’ve stumbled into their website dozens of times while Googling anything that uses “.xls” in the search bar.
This is a customizable yearly calendar: Nothing ground-breaking about that. But what is cool is the presentation format. It is designed such that it can be used as a page finder. And as you guys probably know, my proclivity with Franklin Planners makes this a perfect format for me.
I keep this in a couple of my Planner page finders. It is such a handy index for dates. I find that I get the most use out of this in meetings. Anytime we’re talking about schedules, look-ahead activities, upcoming weekends or holiday target dates, this is a great format to quickly find what you’re looking for.
The other thing this is nice for is tracking. I used this last year around the house to track my lawn fertilizing applications. Again, nothing earth-shattering here, but I thought it would be interesting to show you an application of using it.
Again, I take no credit for it’s development – The folks at Vertex42.com built it, I’m just a really satisfied user.
DOWNLOAD THE YEAR AT A GLANCE CALENDAR (.XLS FORMAT)
Yearly Foldout Calendar
So this one I built from scratch a few years ago. I was looking for a layout for managing my son’s travel baseball team where I could see all of our summer tournaments in once look. Again, being a Franklin Planner junkie, I wanted it to be a fold-out that I could keep in my Planner.
I know that you can find Etsy shops or even go to Franklin Covey’s website and pay $5.95 for a pre-printed version of a calendar like this. Well, 30 minutes worth of dinking around in Excel saves me a couple of bucks every year – I’m good with that….
The format fits on 8-1/2″ x 14″ legal paper. Yes, I’m probably one of the few human beings left on the planet who still dabble with legal sized paper. But if you recall from my article on Tracking Schedules you’ll see my much-used legal sized binder that I use to track all sorts of jobsite activities.
You do have to do a little work with this one every year in January. I have formulas setup to add the dates, but it requires you to manually enter the 1’st day of each month. Not a big deal.
Yes, the boxes are small – It’s hard to get 365 legible boxes on a page, but you get the drift. This is a great planning tool. It worked well for me for years as a baseball team calendar. I’m currently using it for my website posting calendar. Anything that requires a Big Picture look makes this a very useful format.
DOWNLOAD THE YEARLY FOLDOUT CALENDAR (.XLS FORMAT)
DEBRIEF
The After Action Report for this article is simple – Download them and give them a shot. Drop a comment in the box, curious to know what you think.
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