Weekly Calendar (Dated)

Real dates, not blanks

Unlike an undated weekly planner, this one prints the actual calendar dates. Give it any day and it snaps back to the start of that week, then lays out seven days with their real names and numbers.

One to eight consecutive weeks in a single PDF. Weeks start Monday or Sunday, and the days run as seven horizontal rows or seven vertical columns.

Rows or columns

Rows give each day a wide, shallow strip. Good for appointments and short entries, and much easier to read across — you can see the whole of Tuesday in one line.

Columns give each day a tall, narrow space and put the seven side by side. That is the layout for comparing days: three evenings booked in a row is obvious in columns and easy to miss in rows.

Rows for recording. Columns for planning.

Print the term, not the week

The week count goes to eight because printing one week at a time is exactly where the habit dies: you forget on the Sunday, the week starts without a sheet, and by Wednesday the whole system has quietly stopped without anybody deciding to stop it.

Eight weeks stapled together is a half-term. Print it once and there is nothing left to remember.

Which day the week starts

Monday is the international standard and the usual choice in Britain and Europe. Sunday is conventional in North America and Japan.

Pick the one that matches the calendars around you. A planner that disagrees with the wall calendar is a reliable source of the exact error it exists to prevent, and it takes a surprisingly long time to notice.

Priorities and notes

A priorities box sits at the top of each week, a notes strip at the foot. Switch either off and the days expand to fill the page.

Keep the priorities box for the week rather than the day — two or three things that would make this a good week. Daily tasks belong in the day rows, and mixing the two levels makes both harder to read.

Where a dated sheet beats an undated one

Anywhere the date has to be on the page itself. A shift rota, a medication schedule, a training block in the weeks before a race, a revision timetable counting down to an exam that is not going to move.

It also removes the small tax of writing the dates in yourself, which is trivial once and tiresome forty times.

Related: the undated weekly planner, which suits a routine that repeats, and the monthly planner for the wider view.