This article was adapted from a podcast, which you can listen to here.
Breaking the year — one cycle of the earth around the sun — into about 12 months seems intuitive as each month is the duration of roughly one moon-phase cycle. Overlain with a seven-day week, however, months become an awkward obstacle to easily tracking obligations or making plans over several coming months.
Fourteen years ago, on an administrator’s wall at Oxford University, I spotted a continuous calendar, which she was using to see the entire academic year in one view. I instantly saw the value in this and, ever since, have strongly preferred continuous calendars over the ubiquitous — and to me, unnecessarily befuddling — monthly calendars.
Monthly calendars — whether digital or physical — break up the year into 12 blocks of four to five weeks. This means that we typically need to scroll or flip between months to view and track events and deadlines over adjacent weeks and even adjacent days.
Continuous calendars, in contrast, do not haphazardly break up weeks in the middle and adjacent days are always shown immediately next to each other. This continuity and structure makes it much easier to understand the passage of time clearly and at a single glance — which is critical to me many times every single day, from planning complex multi-month projects to simply looking ahead at when I’m free on an upcoming weekend.
With the beginning of the second half of the year starting in a few days, I thought this would be the perfect moment to share my particular take on the continuous calendar with you, as you can easily fit six clearly legible months on a single page with my format.
The continuous calendar is a matrix and every single position in the matrix contains a day — there are no empty cells.
Each row of the matrix is a week. For convenience and ease of reference, I provide the week of the year as an index alongside each row, so my calendar for the second half of 2021 begins with week 26 as the first row.
Each column of the matrix is a day of the week. Following convention in North America where I’ve lived most of my life, my continuous calendar starts with Sunday in the left-most column, but you could start your week with any day that you like.
If everyone in the world used a continuous calendar like me, we probably wouldn’t need months at all. We could refer to any date in the year by the week and the day — such as the 26th Wednesday of the year — but as it stands, we will definitely need months to coordinate with other people. This is easily handled by the continuous calendar — I simply use a thicker line to demarcate breaks between months.
Finally, the day of the month is enumerated in the top-left corner of each cell in the matrix. In my calendar, I used black for standard days and red for U.S. holidays. You could adapt this for your region or as you see fit.
Alongside the day of the month, there’s plenty of room in each cell in my continuous calendar to note down major upcoming events. I color-code events by theme to add a further dimension of structure to my calendar. For example, upcoming lectures I’m giving are in blue, sessions for filming podcast episodes with particular guests are in green, and vacations are in purple.
Since I have found it difficult to find continuous calendars online for printing, I have had to resort to making mine from scratch in Google Sheets. But you don’t need to! You can simply head to jonkrohn.com/cal21 to view my continuous calendar for the second half of 2021 and then print it, make a copy of it in Google Drive, or download it. You are then welcome to adapt it for you.
All right. That’s it for today’s episode — I hope you found it helpful or at least a little thought-provoking! Thanks for listening and I’m looking forward to another round of the SuperDataScience show with you very soon.
