I’ve had a wall calendar for a few years now.

I get the one I use from NeuYear.net, which was recommended to me by Mike Vardy of Productivityist. The first record I can find in my Evernote for Mike’s teachings on the subject is from 2014, so I guess this is my sixth year with a wall calendar.

Originally I started out with Mike’s whole idea of “theme-ing” each month of the upcoming year. So January would usually be HHF for me (“Healthy, Happy, Fit”), February would often be “Money”, March “Deep Work”, April “Spring Cleaning”, etc.

I began to lose zeal for this approach in 2017 when I found I was flailing between my Theme goals for a month and what I would have done anyway (because it was a yearly goal or for other reasons). I also was under the influence of Essentialism and was asking hard questions about how complicated my goal-setting had become. To make a long story short, I stopped Theme-ing.

So why have a wall calendar at all now? The real estate for a single day is sufficient for an icon or two, but not really for much text.

I put on the calendar things that occupy blocks of time, so courses I’m going to teach during the year, vacations, other travel. I mark holidays with a red box.

I get a gestalt of the year-in-progress this way. I guess I avoid some double bookings, but I really rely on my Google calendar for that.

I’ll admit it, I’m on the fence. This could be the last year for a wall calendar. Maybe I could better use the space for a Kanban whiteboard, or maybe just a freeform whiteboard for sketching.

TBD.