Instead of using a paper or digital calendar (whether divided into months, weeks, or days), I use an Excel spreadsheet. The basic idea is a three column spreadsheet: the first column is “description”; the second column is “date”; and the third column is “days.” The description column is just a textual description of an event or a task. If it’s an event, I’ll also put the day and time (e.g., “Tues 1:30pm”). The date column is the actual date of the event or deadline (e.g., “01/21/20”). The day column is a formula, but a very simple one:
= CELL – TODAY()
“CELL” is the just the label of the cell holding the date (e.g., “B2”).
Importantly, the day column shows how many days until the event or deadline, and it is self-updating.
Using a list rather than a calendar is better for me for several reasons:
First, seeing the number of days until every future event or deadline gives me a better sense of how much time is left to finish a task or prepare for an event (versus merely knowing that future events are ‘somewhere’ in the subsequent pages of a multi-page calendar).
Second, because days without key events or deadlines aren’t even on the list, I can usually fit several months of event/task information on a single page/monitor-screen.
Third, adding tasks is easy: just add new lines (with description, date, and the day-formula), then sort the list by date.
Once you are comfortable with Excel, you can make all of this even easier (and with more functionality).
First, you can copy the day-formula down the length of the day column (so you don’t have to keep typing it). To do this, you just select the cell with the day formula, then drag downward to select a long range of cells in that column (such as a hundred cells to start with), then hit Ctrl-D to paste the day formula into all of those selected cells.
Second, you can insert a “priority” column next to the description column and then give tasks and events specific priorities (e.g., 1/2/3 or low/med/high). This lets you focus on events and tasks by priority either globally (by sorting the spreadsheet by priority) or daily (by sorting it by date and priority).
Third, instead of (or in addition to) a priority column, you can have a numerical difficulty column, where the number corresponds to a simple measure of difficulty (e.g., 1/2/3 or easy/med/hard) or a more specific measure, such as the number of minutes/hours/days you expect the task to take. (And when you’ve labeled a given task as hard or time-consuming, that’s a signal that you need to break it down into easier subtasks.)
Fourth, it’s fairly easy to make make macros to work with the list and assign a keystroke to it. For example, I made a macro that selects all cells, then sorts by date and priority, and I assigned it a keyboard shortcut (Ctrl-Shift-S).
I’m sure many other possibilities will occur to you, all prompted by looking at your calendar as a single-page list rather than as a multiple-page grid.
Here is a download link for a simple Excel template incorporating the above ideas, including the Ctrl-Shift-S macro for sorting (although you’ll need to allow/enable macros to work with that feature).
One Idea 