Use a Full Year Calendar (Here, print out mine)

By John Hostile on January 20, 2013

Last year I started doing the Seinfeld productivity method. It works best with a calendar that has the whole year in view at once. I didn’t have anything like that, so my girlfriend and I made one out of a regular calendar. We liked the idea of the calendar being continuous, so we didn’t separate the months. Just look at the picture and you’ll see what I mean.

Now it’s 2013, and I had no calendar to slice up. We looked at it as an opportunity to make something better than last year. My girlfriend does architecture, and is therefore very familiar with CAD work. I asked her to see if she could put a 2013 full-year calendar together using AutoCAD. We designed it together, and with a few tweaks, we ended up with this:


The calendar you see there (which is the one I’m using) is made up of four 11x17 sheets, because we have access to a printer capable of that size. We figured that was plenty big enough for our needs (44x17), and much less expensive than having something printed up poster-sized by a professional printing service.

This time, instead of two long columns, we decided to break the year up into quarters horizontally. As a result, I can reach every part of the calendar from my desk, which I like a lot. I also feel that this format offers even greater perspective over the passage of time than the two column format did.

Even if you don’t do the Seinfeld thing, I think you should use a full-year calendar anyway, and cross off the days as they pass. It will absolutely help you gain perspective over the passage of time, which I think is pretty important (I like to mark future goal dates and deadlines as well). People will also probably ask you about the thing, and you can sound like you have your life together and are super productive while you explain what it is and what you do with it. You can thank me later.

We made the calendar into 8½ x 11 format as well for those of you who want to try this type of calendar and only have access to a regular printer. Download PDFs of our calendar here:

If you try it and dig it, I’d love to hear from you.