Do you have a wall calendar hanging somewhere in your home or office? Maybe more than one? Do you select your wall calendar for its beautiful pictures and only occasionally glance at it? Or do you skip the wall calendar altogether in favor of your portable digital or paper planner?
For most of us, our primary calendar will be a portable one, which facilitates recording and keeping appointments and meetings. But a wall calendar offers several key advantages that can be useful when used in combination with your portable calendar.
Reference
Wall calendars are excellent tools for quickly referring to an upcoming date. In order for your wall calendar to serve as a good reference tool, consider the following:
- Location. You need to hang your calendar so it will be easily viewable and accessible. Popular locations include near the central household telephone, in the kitchen, or near your desk.
- Select a calendar with large enough numbers and clear enough format so that you won’t be puzzling over days and dates when you’re looking at it.
- Many people find the inclusion of a small grid for the previous and following months on the same page as the main month helpful as well.
Planning
Wall calendars typically offer more space to write on, so they can be useful for mapping out goals or deadlines for the month or year. If you want to use a wall calendar for planning purposes, I suggest designating one for planning and one for general reference. Otherwise your planning notes can get confused with actual appointments or deadlines.
- Consider a whiteboard or erasable laminated calendar (typically with blank spaces you fill in with the dates)
- Designating a separate calendar for planning also authorizes you to write on it. Many people want to keep their beautiful art or photography calendar clean and empty. That might look nice, but it’s not so useful as a planning tool.
- You can also print out blank calendar pages from OrganizedHome, CalendarLabs, or Google Calendar and attach them to a bulletin board or magnet board.
Tracking
Wall calendars are excellent tools for recording events, behavior, or information over time and for reinforcing desired behaviors.
- Try using stickers or colored pens to record each day you reach a goal or perform the desired action. For instance, I’m trying to be more consistent about taking my mineral supplements, so I put a sticker on the calendar each day that I take them. Seeing the stickers on the calendar both reminds me to do it and reinforces this as a new habit.
- If you have a gym, yoga, or other membership with a set number of sessions per month, tracking the days you go on a wall calendar easily lets you know how many more classes you have available in the month.
- A household wall calendar is a good place to track information that more than one person might need to know, like when monthly pet medicines need to be given, furnace filters replaced, etc.
A wall calendar can be a very useful productivity tool, but wanting to keep it clean and beautiful because it’s on display holds many people back from truly using it to its fullest extent. So consider using a beautiful one in one location primarily for reference and using another one (even just on another wall of your office) for planning and tracking.
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