Never forget birthdays or important events using this 2020 quarterly calendar printable to track dates and see an overview of when you need to prepare!
I’ve always been intrigued by all the beautiful bullet journal layouts created for collecting all kinds of information and it’s definitely an addiction to keep scrolling on Instagram! There are so many beautiful and functional ways to keep important notes.
Recently, I saw this general layout for a calendaring system and I thought it was perfect for keeping track of birthdays and special events. Designed with the calendar up top and a list format to write out important dates, you can keep track of things on a monthly, quarterly basis and truly see the entire year at-a-glance.
I realized that it was perfect as a reminder on the wall, to make sure I send out those birthday cards and event related occasions. So important to keep connected with friends and family, right?
So I’ve designed this as a printable to add to my system and even though it fits nicely in a binder planner, it’s actually quite nice taped up on the wall as well!
Download the 2020 Quarterly Calendar Printable PDF
Check out these freebie 2020 printable calendar variations to help with your process of planning the most productive year ever!
What’s a 2020 printable calendar for?
I’ve posted about my free 2020 printable calendar previously, but after creating all the printables to help reset my life, I wanted to create another version in the same style. So the first variation is simply the entire year at-a-glance, Monday-start in a classic black and white, minimalist style.
However, as I was considering the various notes I wanted to take, whether from a tracking perspective or a pre-planning perspective, I realized there were a few other year-at-a-glance printables needed.
Similar to the project calendar printable, it’s nice to be able to have a printable for the entire year and list out action bullets for each quarter, each month or even each week. Do you ever find the need for something like that?
I decided to create these variations which are actually perpetual printables that you can use year after year. It’s just a nice way to see plans from a high-level for each of those timeframes.
It’s also quite helpful for the purposes of tracking, if you happen to want to track weekly and monthly tasks. When it comes to daily habit tracking, I try not to focus on more than one new thing at a time. Which means, I simply print the 2020 yearly calendar and cross out the days as I go – easy and simple!
Download your 2020 printable calendar variation below…
So whatever type of calendar you are looking for to help with planning, download below for free. I’m happy to share my planning printables, so that you can create your own DIY planner. I know folks who like to size these down and paste them in smaller planners and bullet journals as well. Whatever works for you!
I truly hope this 2020 printable calendar will help you dive into the new year with intention and productivity. There’s nothing like a new calendar to help you with a fresh start. And of course, ultimately, it’s a mindset thing. Every day is a new day… so I wish you an awesome one, no matter what.
This free printable is part of a series shared on this blog to help reset your life. Here are the other related posts:
At this point, I’m basically ready for the new year and can dive into my regular planning routine, week to week. When most people talk about planners and planning, they are basically referring to some type of calendaring system.
Whether you are using daily, weekly or monthly spreads, horizontal or vertical, or whatever other variations – ultimately, it’s about checking in regularly with your schedule and planning out what you are going to do day to day. Which is fantastic and already ahead of the game from those who try to keep it all in their head. I have no idea how they can do that?!
But all of this pre-planning that I have been sharing is oh SO IMPORTANT. Without thinking about your ultimate goals and what is truly a priority in your life, you can find yourself doing a lot of things, but still not finding satisfaction. And I think that’s what happened to me in the past. I have always loved to do things and I keep myself pretty busy in general. I never say I’m bored!
However, being a busy bee doing things, does NOT necessarily mean you will feel great at the end of the day. You might be doing a lot of things for other people or things you think you should do – but in the end, they do not bring you joy at all. So that’s why this whole process brings me closer to peace of mind and dare I say, planner peace?
So Many Planner Options
Just kidding, there probably is no such thing as ultimate planner nirvana. Because we are ever changing and that means our systems need to change with us. That is why I love planner printables so much. I need some type of structure, but I also need the flexibility to change things up constantly.
A perfect example is transitioning from summertime to back-to-school. I have little kids in the house and my summer schedule is nothing like the regular school year. This is one of the reasons why I don’t like dated pre-bound planners. I feel like months are wasted on minimal entries during the summer or vacations.
Suffice to say, we are all different, our lives are different, our schedules are different and thus our needs for planners are different. It’s amazing that there are so many options out there on the market and we can pick and choose whatever works for us personally.
I’m definitely a functional planner, so even though I love ALL THE PRETTY THINGS, I have to face the facts and realize my planner is for productivity, not creativity. I actually have memory keeping and creative journals separate from my planner.
Why Planner Printables?
So when it comes to my planning system, I use planner printables. And yes, I often change it up whenever I feel the need. In the past, I have tried pre-bound planners and bullet journaling. I feel like printables are a bit in the middle, where you have set templates, but you don’t have to draw them out every single time. And since I can create them myself on a budget, I definitely prefer to use digital printables.
For 2020 I’m going with a minimal black and white style, just like all the worksheets you have seen in this series. I’ve created monthly, weekly and daily calendar layouts, so I can use those that apply for whatever season I’m in. I also like my monthly calendar to have six rows, so every day has it’s own box – so I really felt the need to create my own. For 2020 it only applies for March, August and November, but I would rather have extra boxes at the end, than have to squish things into half boxes. I have always disliked the way they put two days in a box on wall calendars!
Personally, I print all the pages I need and compile them all in a ring binder on my desk. I’m not someone who needs to carry my planner with me, so this is definitely an at home, desk planner type of situation. And because I like to keep things flexible, I usually only print things out about month ahead of time. I don’t ever feel the need to have an entire year of dated calendars. If you check-in with your planning regularly, you can fill in the month or week as you go. Or literally just have a future planning page to keep a list, as with bullet journaling.
For actual appointments and dated events, I keep them all in my Google calendar for the reminders on my phone and the ease of moving things around. My paper planner is much more about my work and personal goals and projects that need to be planned out and scheduled out.
Download these Free Planner Printables
For these free planner printables, I decided to create completely blank versions to share here on the blog. Normally, I would fill in titles and dates, since I’m printing straight from my own design files at home. But leaving everything blank means you can fill in the labels and titles yourself. Whether you like a Monday start or a Sunday start, you can create your own and re-use these digital printables repeatedly.
I use variations depending on the season of my life when more or less is happening. Sometimes a horizontal layout works better and other times the vertical layout works better. It really just depends, just as there are periods when the daily page is helpful for a time period when I want to track more information. Take your pick and build your own custom planner!
I hope you will be able to make use of these free planner printables to help you create a system that works for you. Ultimately, it’s about doing the things you want to do and feeling good at the end of the day. I wish you all the best!
This free printable is part of a series shared on this blog to help reset your life. Here are the other related posts:
I prefer to start with the ideal and that’s why I haven’t talked about time constraints up to this point. Whatever you desire in your life plan, it’s a nice exercise to work through all your goals and how you can achieve them. However, after creating your project plans, even if they are partial and incomplete, you’ll still have an estimate of time required at the bottom of the worksheet.
Obviously, these are all rough estimates and there’s no way to know if you are estimating correctly or if changes will occur in the future. Actually, it’s inevitable that something will change, so you just have to make educated estimates and plan with the information you have right now. The idea is to be able to outline your schedule on a high-level, so you aren’t fooling yourself into working on 10 projects when you only have the hours to complete two.
How Much Time Do You Have?
So the first thing you need to do is to find out how much time you actually have to work on projects. We often overestimate how much time we will spend working on our goals, because there’s the rest of life and responsibilities going on that take up a lot of time.
When you consider the everyday things you have to do, your job and just resting times, there’s an obvious limitation to how many hours you can devote to projects. The process I go through to figure out the time I have available, is to print out a year-at-a-glance calendar. I have a freebie you can download on my my gumroad but any yearly calendar will do, so that you can mark it up. It’s not something you need to keep forever.
On the yearly calendar, use a black pen or marker to black out the dates that you will NOT be working on projects. These are days you literally are not going to take into account like holidays, birthdays and vacation days. We often put way too much on our plate, so be realistic. For example, once my kids are out of school for the Christmas holidays, there’s no way I’m going to be spending hours on projects. I block out whole weeks, because all the holiday stuff is going on and I will already be super busy.
Maybe you have a day job and you focus on personal projects on the weekends only. Or maybe you want to devote a certain number of hours only on weekends and never count weekdays. First thing is to simply block out all the days that aren’t available.
Then I go through month by month and consider how many hours I have available on the non-blacked out days. We are estimating here, but this will give you a good idea of what is possible for the whole year. After your normal responsibilities and life schedule, how many hours do you actually have per day to work on personal projects? It might be 1 hour day before or after work. Or maybe it’s a half-day on Tuesdays when you don’t work. It’s probably a combination of hours throughout the week, but it is limited.
I use the calendar and do some quick math to make totals for each month. How many hours do I really have each month to work on projects? It’s a lot of scribbling and estimating, but it’s still valuable information on the ideal. So yes, this is ideal, because we often want ourselves to work more than maybe is even possible. When you have an estimate of hours for each month, you should probably go back and knock off 10%-20% of the time you to account for unplanned events, sick days and just downtime.
I realize it might be difficult to make these decisions and everything might feel like a guess, but that is okay. Again, we can only make decisions based on the information we have on hand. So make your best guess and go from there. You will still be much more informed without having done this exercise. And as the year unfolds itself, you can always do this exercise again. Your work schedule might change or a major life change happens, so you just have to re-evaluate and re-plan!
Scheduling Projects on Your Project Calendar
Once I have my available hours and my list of projects with time estimates, then I can start scheduling in my projects for the entire year. When I first completed this exercise, I realized that I had a lot less time than I thought. We often think, whoa, it’s a whole year, I should be able to complete all kinds of projects.
But when you really break it down, you’ll realize there is limited time and it’s better to set a realistic schedule than to always feel behind on a million projects. Honestly, if you literally finish all your projects and have loads of time left, there’s no doubt you’ll be able to find something else to work on… so I think that is the last of our worries.
It’s much better to complete what you say you will complete, building up your self-confidence year after year. And even if you fall short, each time you are going learn what your limits are and make better more realistic plans.
Ongoing Versus One-Time Projects
We are all unique individuals and have different goals, so you might have projects that seem ongoing versus projects that are a one-time, get it done and it’s finished kind of thing. Fitness and health goals are often more like building habits that should be ongoing. Whereas planning your wedding or building a website is more or less a one-time project that finishes on a set date.
I think the process can still be similar when it comes to planning and scheduling. You still want to make a list of tasks and prepare yourself to take action. And when it comes to scheduling, you just need to estimate the time required every single day or week or month. You have to account for meal planning or exercise time within your schedule. Ultimately, you have a set amount of hours to use, so schedule things in as you see fit and make sure you aren’t overloading yourself.
For one-time projects, I think of them very linearly. If the project takes 20 hours and in a month I have 25 hours, then I’m probably only going to get that one project done. If you like working on multiple things in parallel, you just have to split the hours and see what fits in your available time. That’s sort of what you are doing with ongoing projects – basically allotting the hours needed each week for that project.
Digital Calendaring
One tool you can use to visually see your schedule before it’s set in stone is Google Calendar or any digital calendaring system. You can create a new calendar that is separate from whatever you might already be using and just block out time to see how things fit. With digital calendars you can shift and move things easily and set reoccurring events for ongoing projects. You aren’t actually scheduling exact times for projects, it’s more just to see how things can fit in the time you have available.
Once you have a rough overview to look at, you can see if what you have documented looks realistic. And this is when you need to set challenging, yet achievable plans. One of the biggest issues I hit upon when planning is not allowing down-time and rest times in between tasks and projects. We sort of think if we have 4 hours that we would be working those entire 4 hours. But honestly, we know that is unrealistic! Literally, you have to go to the bathroom at some point, right? It’s easy to get distracted and switching tasks means you have to switch your frame of mind and it’s not easy to jump from one thing to another.
There’s also the time to decompress when you finish a big project, before starting the next one. It can’t possibly be the very next day!
So build in buffer time and try to be brutally honest of when you can get things done and if the expectations you have are realistic with your life.
Finally…
I know this process might seem overwhelming at first. I certainly felt a bit of dread at the beginning, mostly because I realized that I really didn’t have enough time to work on all my projects. Ugh! When I blocked out my calendar and estimated the hours per day, my totals per month didn’t really allow for 5 projects a month – hah!
We all have limits and I think it’s important to admit them and force ourselves to be more realistic. Even though you have project plans written out, it doesn’t mean you have to act on them immediately. Maybe order things in priority and see how much you can get through to truly understand your pace from month to month.
And remember that the plan and schedule you come up with will morph and change over time. We can’t predict everything that is going to happen in the coming year, so something is bound to change and shift. That is life!
Ultimately, we just want to be as prepared as we can and have a high-level overview of the direction we are heading in. It helps to calm my nerves and makes me feel less anxious about what I can accomplish in the coming year. I think knowing that really helps with your personal satisfaction at the end of the day.
Year-at-a-Glance Project Calendar
So once you have a general understanding of what projects you have time to work on, use this year-at-a-glance project calendar to write down where each project falls. This gives you a really nice year-long overview of what is happening throughout your year.
I have a box version where you can simply bullet point the projects ongoing for each month. This works well also because each row is one quarter of the year. However, I also created a landscape version where you are meant to write, draw or washi tape in each project in timeline fashion. For projects that are year-long or don’t fit well into being listed month by month, the timeline view might be better.
Use whichever version works for you or both if you want a written version versus a more visual bar graphic version. Turns out perhaps we are creating fancy Gantt charts for our projects!
I hope this project scheduling process has been helpful for you and at the end of your planning session, you’ll have a nice overview of your projects for the year. I love seeing all my projects on the project calendar printables, giving me a neat and tidy way to see it all at-a-glance.
This free printable is part of a series shared on this blog to help reset your life. Here are the other related posts:
This project planning template will transform your dream into an action plan, so you can follow the steps forward toward success!
Goals without Plans are Just Dreams
We all want to accomplish things, but even after you take the time to develop S.M.A.R.T. goals, if you don’t have a plan, you might still struggle to execute and succeed. Project planning is simply the process of defining what you want to do and how you are going to do it – in detail – so that you can get it done by simply following your plan, step-by-step.
In the professional project management world, project planning is a huge undertaking that maps out large-scale projects. There might be multiple teams of people involved and many moving parts and dependencies. It makes sense that they need to document and organize everything in order to keep an eye on the big picture.
You might think that your personal goals should be straightforward, so you don’t need a written out plan. And I agree that from a personal perspective, our goals probably don’t need super fancy Gantt charts or 100 pages of documentation. But you still need to have a plan of action and writing it all down gives you a lot of clarity.
The only way to get yourself results is to actually take the actions to complete your goal. I know it sounds simple and obvious, but I think we have all been there before – completely overwhelmed and not getting anything done at the end of the day.
Project Planning
To set yourself up for success, take your goals and create a project plan for each goal. I’ve created a project planning template printable to help with the process. All you have to do is print out multiple copies and fill them out. If you have a particular challenging goal, you can even split it up into multiple phases to make it easier for you to take action. The more you can break something down, the easier it will be to approach.
Although I’m talking specifically about goals developed from the life categories we’ve explored previously, you can develop a plan for any project you have in mind. Anything that requires multiple steps and considerations needs a project plan.
Now, if you already know what to do, it might literally be as simple as a list that you go through to complete. It CAN be very simple, but simple doesn’t mean it’s easy. How many times have we set goals and intentions, but not acted upon them, right? I really challenge you to write it all down. As you go through the process, often new ideas and parts will come up and you can keep adding to your project plan to keep track of everything.
The beauty of a project plan is that it forces you to consider all parts of a project and possible problems. It’s time to take a good hard look at the project details and the idea is that you end up with all the information needed to get started.
Sometimes when you tackle a new project, you might not know all the steps required to complete the whole project. That’s totally okay. The idea is to put down all the information you DO know and importantly, the very next action you need to take. Maybe it’s research, so you find out what to do next.
Think of the project plan as a living breathing document, because as you go along, you might add tasks or rearrange the order of tasks. You can tweak the plan along the way. Make your best estimates on the time required, just so you have an idea on how long the project might take. Again, you can edit as necessary along the way.
A project plan is not set in stone, so that you have to follow it through, no matter what. It’s can morph along the way because the point is that it’s a tool to help you take action. You just need to know what the next step is.
Also, remember that you can add documents, informational bits and any other related material with your project plan. Think of it as creating an all encompassing “file” for the project. Having everything in one place will make it easier for you to execute and that is the key. I use all these printables to help with my productivity and organize everything in a big binder with page protectors to hold extra materials.
What’s next?
Print out the project planning template for all the goals you have set from the last blog post and start planning! This process can be really fun and there’s nothing like making beautiful plans for the future. If you find things getting a bit messy, no worries. Print another copy and rewrite your plans in a more organized fashion, if you want to reorder tasks or edit some of your answers to be more concise. It’s a process that can actually help you “work out” the project details, until you end up with something you understand and can take action on.
This free printable is part of a series shared on this blog to help reset your life. Here are the other related posts:
Hello! I'm Linda, the girl behind this printables blog. I post free printables and share my creative projects along the way.
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FREE 2020 Calendar Download this year at-a-glance printable pdf and start planning for success. Yearly calendars are great for reference around the home and office. Download on Gumroad
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