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Four years ago I developed a special kind of calendar for my own Getting Things Done practice. It was so helpful and useful in terms of learning how to implement a ‘Hard Landscape‘ and get real control over my time and my appointments/meetings.

Updated for 2011!

(USD $9.00)

A revolution in calendar design, that you can print for yourself!

What exactly should a calendar do? And how should you use it to get the most out of your day?

Rule number 1: Your calendar should not work against you.

Your calendar should be your guide, a map or a directory to get you through your day. The layout of the information should be designed to work with your natural viewing habits. It needs to help you, not hurt you.

Rule number 2: Your calendar is not a ‘to-do’ list.

A calendar is a tool that is supposed to tell you where you need to be and when you need to be there, or when something is scheduled to happen.

For those of you familiar with David Allen’s Getting Things Done productivity system, you know that only three things are to be entered into your calendar. Three things. That’s it.

1. Time-specific actions

“Time-specific actions” are, simply put, appointments or meetings. These are the things that have to happen at, you guessed it, a specific time.

2. Day-specific actions

“Day-specific actions” are things that need to get done on a certain day, but not at a pre-arranged time. For example, you may need to print out the latest sales figures sometime on Thursday, because you have a meeting to review those figures at 9:00 am Friday. “Print sales figures” goes into the calendar for Thursday as an Action, while “Sales Meeting” goes into the calendar for Friday as an Event.

3. Day-specific information

“Day-specific information” consists of things that you need to know on a certain day, such as directions to a meeting, what your spouse is doing that day, or where to find contact information for a call you need to make. It can also serve as a pointer to a Reference File or something on your Waiting For list.

(USD $9.00)

Putting Raw Data Into the Calendar Pages

It doesn’t take a genius to print your own calendar pages and then punch some information into the right slots. That’s not the hard part. The hard part is putting the information into your calendar in a way that makes it easy to get that information out again.

Getting Information Out of Your Calendar

How do you read your calendar pages? You think you know, but do you? Marketing and advertising experts have been studying how the human eye and brain looks at text and images for years now — it’s in their best interests to know what you’re looking at and when.

Research has shown that consistently, people look in the same places and in the same patterns. Now that the internet is in such wide usage, researchers have been able to scientifically track where your eyes are going when you look at a web page and by association, at your calendar pages.

The “F-Pattern” and What It Means When You Print Your Own DIY Calendar

Readers don’t read.

Users won’t read text thoroughly in a word-by-word manner. Exhaustive reading is rare, and people are busy.
The beginning is the most important.

The first two paragraphs must state the most important information. There’s some hope that users will actually read all of this material, though they’ll probably read more of the first paragraph than the second.

Subheads and bullets are vital.

Start subheads, paragraphs, and bullet points with information-carrying words that users will notice when scanning down the left side of your content in the final stem of their F-behavior. They’ll read the third word on a line much less often than the first two words.

If you can use this information to create a web page that delivers more information more quickly, it follows that you can use the same principles to design a calendar page that does the same thing.

(USD $9.00)

The F-Pattern Put to Practical Use

The result of this work is a set of calendar pages that incorporates the “F-pattern” in its design. Set up as a two-page system, the vertical left-hand column of each page in your DIY Planner is set aside for the most important items that you need to look at.

The strategy behind this design is to incorporate the natural eye-movements in the “F-pattern” found in the eye-tracking study:

* The “Big Rocks” are listed first, on the left-hand edge of the page. This is where your eyes spend the most time, and this is where you look first while planning and executing.

* Your ‘Most Important Tasks’ get listed at the top of the column for each day.

* Appointments for the day go across the top of both pages. This is the second place your eyes will scan, giving you an “automatic” quick-review of what is coming up, and what has been accomplished.

* The middle of the left-hand page leads the eye to an area for focusing on open @Project contexts. This acts as a guide for our eyes, again to be able to review which Next Actions are outstanding. There is room in each box for the Context.

* The small calendar in the very bottom left is dated with the days of the week, in a Monday through Sunday format.

* The middle of the right-hand page contains a prompt for you to enter your Weekly Review notes.

If you found this article useful, consider supporting my efforts here by purchasing the calendar I developed. It is not a free calendar download, but what good are some of the free calendars you can print when they don’t save you any time or improve your productivity?

Click on the image to the left in order to visit the store and see the GTD Printable Calendar, a DIY Planner set of 2-page-per-week calendar pages which you can download. The most current edition is available now. If you are interested in having me design a customized calendar for you, please let me know.

If you would like to get involved join our Affiliate Program, or send an e-mail with your thoughts or suggestions to stephen [at] stephenpsmith [dot] com.

You can purchase this calendar in a PDF download here: (USD $9.00)

Thank you so much for supporting Productivity in Context!

See this post at D*I*Y Planner:

In the words of Douglas Adams:

A towel…is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you - daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

I just put it in my Tickler File for next year! Sorry about the lack of activity, I have been busy with a new venture of sorts. More on it soon, I promise.

UPDATE: Link - Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towel_day

The Cluetrain Manifesto is one of the books that really inspired me to take up this proto-career of blogging. I believe that the concept of increasing conversation as expained by the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto is one of the most important ideas of this decade; it will fundamentally change the way we do business, and everything else. I came across this reference at Doc Searls’ weblog, where the influence of the Cluetrain is seen everywhere.

The proof of the pudding is this post by Liza Sabater at Culture Kitchen, where she describes the revolution of political activity that is coming over the horizon: (Editor’s note: Once again this is about facts and debate and conversation, there will be no discussion of Left vs Right here, rather an examination of the tools, the online environment, the process and how they are changing. If you want to talk about the merits of each side, please do so at your blog and leave a link in the Comments. Thank you.)

The internet is not just changing the way we buy products or ideas. It is changing the basic dynamics of human engagement from how we meet, how we learn from each other, even how we mate.

Of course, the internet has proved to be powerful as a tool for political resource building, but in my book, it has not been used powerfully enough.

Applied to politics, the Manifesto reads as a primer on how the internet squashes any pretences of republic-like politics. Gone are the days in which engagement is only mediated by an elite ‘entrusted’ by the masses with every single policy and political decision making that will end up affecting their lives.

People Powered Politics is just starting in this country, but we are not there yet. Still, I believe 2008 will go down in history as the last Plato-centric, republic-like elections. Yet, after 2008, I cannot imagine the US Electoral college system surviving because people will demand more and more direct engagement in every single aspect of the political process.

Sabater goes on to translate the 95 Theses into a new list for political discourse. Where the original Cluetrain’ described the evolving business environment, this new list describes the evolution of the constituency. The whole world is changing (the original list):

1. Markets are conversations.

2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.

3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.

4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.

5. People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.

6. The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.

And Sabater’s new list:

1. Constituencies are conversations.
2. Constituencies consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.
4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.
5. People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.
6. The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.

And when you get down into the meat of the list, things really get interesting. For example:

71. Your tired notions of “the constituency” make our eyes glaze over. We don’t recognize ourselves in your projections—perhaps because we know we’re already elsewhere.
72. We like this new constituencyplace much better. In fact, we are creating it.
73. You’re invited, but it’s our world. Take your shoes off at the door. If you want to barter with us, get down off that camel!
74. We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.
75. If you want us to talk to you, tell us something. Make it something interesting for a change.
76. We’ve got some ideas for you too: some new tools we already use, some better services we’ve already produced. Stuff we’d be willing to pay you to use. Got a minute?
77. You’re too busy “doing politics” to answer our email? Oh gosh, sorry, gee, we’ll come back later. Maybe.

This is the kind of intelligent and thought-provoking “conversation starter” that is perfect for Web 2.0, and the logical extension of the Cluetrain’ evolution. What is the next field of human endeavor that will be subjected to such analysis? A Healthcare manifesto? Economics? Education?

I have a suggestion: send an email to your federal, state, and local government officials. Tell them about this. Then send one to your doctor, your banker, your kid’s teacher and principal.

The world is changing, the Cluetrain is leaving the station, you do not want to be left behind.

From time to time I come across an inspirational quote that I like to share with my readers. Today’s comes from Chogyam Trungpa:

“We have long forgotten that activities can be simple and precise.
Every act of our lives can contain simplicity and precision and thus
can have tremendous beauty and dignity.”

The practice of Getting Things Done is designed to make our daily activities simple to execute, in order to reduce the stress of attempting to remember the tasks we have to do. The first step, Collection, ensures that we have captured every task and activity. When we Process and Organize these Next Actions, we apply a tool that enables us to complete these tasks with precision. The Review stage allows us to track our progress, confirming that we are, in fact, Doing the right things at the right time.

Simplicity and precision are the hallmarks of Getting Things Done. The beauty and the dignity of an empty in-box are the rewards of mindful execution.