The neatnik calendar is very nice. Others are talking about enhancements they've done and I've done my own, creating a pretty faithful JavaScript implementation with enhancements:
Awesome! Totally love your version as my first gripe was that I can't adjust naming to fit my needs (localized, non-english). Your JS version is awesome, thanks!
Big fan for a very long time and still appreciate his work. His domain changed to follow his life choices.[1]
Later in life, I realize that too much reliance on tools is not something I’m fond of. DSri’s tools (printables) are good and I usually do it when I’m helping out team members, and others looking for guardrails for their productivity. For me now, the tools are too tool-focused and I no longer need them. I have printed and used them for product groups, and even a few times for my daughter’s projects with her friends.
These look great for people who like to plan their tasks. I found that when I plan my tasks and plan my day and plan my time bubbles, I spend so much time planning that I don't have time left for doing. This planner explicitly encourages having only three planned tasks for the day. What's wrong with just doing those tasks without writing them down?
I ask in full seriousness, as someone struggling decades with how to plan and then do personal and professional tasks. I ask as a question, not as a criticism.
Writing down is a sign-post for you to stay in your lane.
Otherwise, you were working on a task and something fail in your terminal; by evening you realize you spent the last 4 hours fixing your entire dotfiles, fixing environment, shell, and what-not to move easily between machines smoothly (you also realized you are not moving machines anytime soon).
The Frog to Eat that you wrote down yesterday for today, and the other tasks that has to be done today is there for you to see - bright, and clear - helps you steer back when your minds starts to wander, phone distracts, and HN is tempting for more comments.
> Writing down is a sign-post for you to stay in your lane.
I think I get it now. When I'm developing a feature, I'll first write a commented git commit message. I'll refer back to it every so often to ensure that whatever that commit message says, that's what I'm doing. Everything else that I want to do should go into an Org mode file that is not committed.
> #git commit -m "Foo the bar"
Is what I'm debugging now directly related to fooing the bar? If not, write it down and get back to fooing the bar.
CSS rules for printing is one of my favorite features of the web. You get a powerful typesetter directly in your browser. For those wondering how it's done, I wrote about it [0] recently for my friends who frequently asked how I generated PDFs for my blogs.
Thank you for the nice (and still short) article - I really liked it.
However, while these rules apply for web pages, I would like to... let's say warn all developers expecting CSS is a good option for accurate printing.
It may work for single page printouts or "make this page more printable" approaches, but don't expect it to be an easy opt out of providing PDFs for every single use case.
CSS for printing gets annoying pretty quick as soon as you have some more sophisticated requirements. You should probably also know that print-CSS is not fully cross browser compatible - there are quirks and caveats for every single one of them regarding font sizing, margin, padding and page-layouts.
I would not recommend to use HTML + CSS for something that really needs to be exactly the same layout in every browser.
OTOH, it's good enough that a webapp I vibe-coded in 5 minutes on the phone is better at typesetting and aligning label stickers than Microsoft Word. Or at least easier and gives correct results on the first try, vs. Word that gives me correct results approximately never; I've wasted close to person-day fighting with it over the year already.
Thanks for the feedback! Agreed, I too have experienced those quirks. This applies to most modern CSS features in general :-)
FWIW, I also have had also success with running a server-side headless chromium instance on an app where I was generating nicely formatted exam from provided questions.
Yeah we wanted something that would print with exact physical sizes and there's no reliable support for that so we ended up generating PDF with PDFium in WebAssembly.
This is a really clever tool. I love the clean, one-page layout for tracking habits over a full year.
One suggestion: would it be possible to add a quarterly version? Like three months per page, or separate pages for each quarter? It'd be great for shorter-term goals without everything feeling so crammed on one sheet.
Neat, but it takes two pages on printing in the landscape orientation in Firefox on either A4 or US letter paper sizes here, with minimal font size set to 16. Generally matching of text dimensions to container dimensions is unreliable if you take into account browser settings (not just minimal font size, but also things like differing fonts and disabled custom fonts), and perhaps an SVG image with pre-rendered texts would be more appropriate for such a task. Or even a more pages-oriented format, and for different paper sizes.
I did something, much simpler, some time back in Google Sheets. Around year-end, I go and edit the location of the starting dates each month (drag around, some formatting). I also like the weekdays lined up instead. Use it more as a bigger-picture timeline/schedule for the year, for the family, and me.
Here is the template from last year that I shared with friends. If you are looking at it, take this as a base or an idea and build on it — finances, big life events, travel, etc.
The “Year” tab is kinda like a big-picture plan of where family members are in their years, education, and, hence, significant life events. As the months go by in the year, just fold/hide that portion.
PS. I’m tinkering with moving to a plainer text format this year, in MarkDown planning for a 10-year, 20-year, 30-years, and then kinda brain-simulation of what might be in 50 or even 100 years after I’m gone. I plan for the family/generation as an entity and I just insert myself as one of the role in it. ;-)
This is like a video that I saw where a carpenter uses very high end equipment and skills to create a phone holder to be placed on a desk.
We ran out of real work and real problems.
Tech and machinery is far ahead of the needs of humanity. Yes, you can create and print a single page calendar or carve out a phone holder, but when you think of it's usage, you are not going to need it - YAGNI.
There are proven advantages to hand-writing out notes and planning on paper over digital tools - the physical, tactile experience engages your brain in different ways, and this has been proven by multiple studies.
Digital tools are great. They're why they're here. But a lot of people want paper for good reasons, and it's a very different experience to wanting a wooden holder for your phone.
I agree on the benefits of tactile experience. But it need not come from paper, which is very modern thing. Information is being sucked out from real world, into digital space. College teachers are no longer writing on blackboards. Money is no longer a physical thing. Work is being done in virtual spaces. The only things that are left in physical world are the information-less objects, just like how the world was before invention of writing.
When information finds its natural habitat in the digital space, we need to re-orient ourselves.
This is BRILLIANT!! Thank You. Such as simple idea I wonder I have never thought of doing it myself. I currently have Stick notes to do list but it is a little messy with some date on it.
The older I am, the more I use good old fashion analogue tools like pencil and paper.
Saw this last year and liked it so much I added something very similar to it to Infumap (https://github.com/infumap/infumap). You can drag items of arbitrary type onto dates. When more than one item is associated with a date, a numbered button appears; clicking it lets you cycle through them. Items can be pages or links to pages, which when clicked show the page as a popup. Calendar pages in the parent page display as a list of all items scheduled for the next seven days.
I've used a Google Sheet exactly like this. Highlighted weekends and laid out with all days of the year. Export as PDF can fit on a single sheet of paper. But I also print it out on a huge paper and hang it up for my family. [https://bettersheets.co/bigyear]
This is really nice. I keep track of most important habits to me like how often I go to gym, how much protein I eat everyday, and how many days I read (books), on something physical (pen and paper). Mostly on monthly calendars. This would make tracking each of them separately on a single piece of paper across the entire year pretty neat.
I used to make these for myself and found them very helpful for planning out the year. Mine had only one difference, which was aligning the days of the week between each month.
I think they mean writing Tu Th Sa Su instead of T T S S (personally I'm a fan of T / theta if I'm doing single-letter abbreviations but Sat/Sun is still not the best)
Maybe we should all adopt Chinese weekday names: Sunday (星期日) remains same, Firstday (星期一) for Monday, Seconday (星期二) for Tuesday, Thirday (星期三) for Wednesday, Fourthday (星期四) for Thursday, Fifthday (星期五) for Friday and Sixthday (星期六) for Saturday. One-letter abbreviations would be simply S, 1 through 6.
You're likely being downvoted not because there's anything wrong with having an opinion but because this feels like a low effort comment that contributes little to nothing, and comes across as quite negative and dismissive[0]. There's nothing to engage with or spark curiosity and the parentheses don't help with that.
[0]: Surely you know what printing and paper are, and how someone would jot something down, so that part comes across as ridiculing the idea.
Patronizing speculation on the reasons for downvotes (who gaf about such things? And for that matter I had a net gain today despite this) contributes nothing of value and explicitly violates one of HN's guidelines: "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
I attempted to jocularly make a point (e.g., I don't carry a pen or pencil and I almost never print anything, and I'm far from the only person who has made this sort of change in life practice) and the parenthetical was supposed to help to understand what it was and ward off the sort of criticism you're making, but apparently it was futile or even backfired, as it seems that a lot of people missed it and lashed out with hostility ... they should consider https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/6k68hi/the_prin....
> Surely you know what printing and paper are, and how someone would jot something down, so that part comes across as ridiculing the idea.
See, you completely and uncharitably misunderstood what I was attempting to convey. Yes, of course I know what those things are, but I no longer use them. People would jot things down with a pen or pencil, but that requires having a pen or pencil handy ... I almost never do, as a matter of ==> my <== work habits. That's the whole point of the parenthetical--that this is ==> my <== perspective. It doesn't "ridicule" people who do things differently, but it does allude to the fact that the world has changed (radically, speaking as a lifelong early adopter and a pioneer developer [I'm mentioned in RFC #57] for the last 3/4 century ... so much for insults that get thrown my way--including on HN today--as a "boomer" on a regular basis).
The neatnik calendar is very nice. Others are talking about enhancements they've done and I've done my own, creating a pretty faithful JavaScript implementation with enhancements:
https://github.com/abetusk/neatocal
https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/ (demo)
URL parameters can be used to alter behavior. Here's a highlight of some of them:
https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?layout=aligned-weekdays&... (weekend highlighted, aligned)
https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?start_month=7 (academic)
https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?start_month=6&n_month=6 (second half, 6 month)
https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?month_code=1%E6%9C%88,2%... (chinese month and day)
There's also a data file option for more complex date notes.
Awesome! Totally love your version as my first gripe was that I can't adjust naming to fit my needs (localized, non-english). Your JS version is awesome, thanks!
If you want something for your examples, this would be the German-localized version for 2026: https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?year=2026&weekday_code=S...
Added to the list of presets in the README [0]. Thanks!
[0] https://github.com/abetusk/neatocal?tab=readme-ov-file#prese...
Thanks for sharing!
Daveseah.com was a favorite bookmark for me -- his "printable CEO" series of task planners and calendars were cool.
I have since fallen off the productivity wagon unfortunately.
For many years past I have printed and used stacks of the Emergent Task Planner.
He has a Compact Calendar that has somewhat similar layout as OP.
Edit to add link:
https://davidseah.com/node/compact-calendar/
The website domain seems to have changed a bit.
Big fan for a very long time and still appreciate his work. His domain changed to follow his life choices.[1]
Later in life, I realize that too much reliance on tools is not something I’m fond of. DSri’s tools (printables) are good and I usually do it when I’m helping out team members, and others looking for guardrails for their productivity. For me now, the tools are too tool-focused and I no longer need them. I have printed and used them for product groups, and even a few times for my daughter’s projects with her friends.
1. https://dsriseah.com/about/sri/
These look great for people who like to plan their tasks. I found that when I plan my tasks and plan my day and plan my time bubbles, I spend so much time planning that I don't have time left for doing. This planner explicitly encourages having only three planned tasks for the day. What's wrong with just doing those tasks without writing them down?
I ask in full seriousness, as someone struggling decades with how to plan and then do personal and professional tasks. I ask as a question, not as a criticism.
Writing down is a sign-post for you to stay in your lane.
Otherwise, you were working on a task and something fail in your terminal; by evening you realize you spent the last 4 hours fixing your entire dotfiles, fixing environment, shell, and what-not to move easily between machines smoothly (you also realized you are not moving machines anytime soon).
The Frog to Eat that you wrote down yesterday for today, and the other tasks that has to be done today is there for you to see - bright, and clear - helps you steer back when your minds starts to wander, phone distracts, and HN is tempting for more comments.
I see, thanks.
I think I get it now. When I'm developing a feature, I'll first write a commented git commit message. I'll refer back to it every so often to ensure that whatever that commit message says, that's what I'm doing. Everything else that I want to do should go into an Org mode file that is not committed. Is what I'm debugging now directly related to fooing the bar? If not, write it down and get back to fooing the bar.I prefer this one: https://veckonr.se/kalender/2026
The year is split in two (ample space for notes) and it has week numbers. At work I print the year on two A3.
CSS rules for printing is one of my favorite features of the web. You get a powerful typesetter directly in your browser. For those wondering how it's done, I wrote about it [0] recently for my friends who frequently asked how I generated PDFs for my blogs.
[0] https://barish.me/blog/make-your-website-printable-with-css/
Thank you for the nice (and still short) article - I really liked it.
However, while these rules apply for web pages, I would like to... let's say warn all developers expecting CSS is a good option for accurate printing.
It may work for single page printouts or "make this page more printable" approaches, but don't expect it to be an easy opt out of providing PDFs for every single use case.
CSS for printing gets annoying pretty quick as soon as you have some more sophisticated requirements. You should probably also know that print-CSS is not fully cross browser compatible - there are quirks and caveats for every single one of them regarding font sizing, margin, padding and page-layouts.
I would not recommend to use HTML + CSS for something that really needs to be exactly the same layout in every browser.
OTOH, it's good enough that a webapp I vibe-coded in 5 minutes on the phone is better at typesetting and aligning label stickers than Microsoft Word. Or at least easier and gives correct results on the first try, vs. Word that gives me correct results approximately never; I've wasted close to person-day fighting with it over the year already.
Thanks for the feedback! Agreed, I too have experienced those quirks. This applies to most modern CSS features in general :-)
FWIW, I also have had also success with running a server-side headless chromium instance on an app where I was generating nicely formatted exam from provided questions.
Yeah we wanted something that would print with exact physical sizes and there's no reliable support for that so we ended up generating PDF with PDFium in WebAssembly.
Gutenberg[1] Print Styles has been my go-to for a very long time. If I remember correctly, the issues I faced was that I could not control pagination.
1. https://github.com/BafS/Gutenberg
Neat! I'll add it to my blog.
Neat, I did one of these too :)
https://voussoir.net/writing/css_for_printing
This looks neat, not exactly sure how useful such a tiny space for each day would be by itself.
I took the complete opposite approach with Wiseday, giving each day its own page (and each waking hour some space too.)
Example: https://imgur.com/a/LjSDPw9
V1 releasing on iOS as soon as Apple finishes reviewing if anyone wants to try (waitlist at https://wisedayplanner.com/waitlist/)
The info box doesn't mention this but it also has an alternative layout where days are aligned by weekdays: https://neatnik.net/calendar/?layout=aligned-weekdays
The same, but for the year 2026: https://neatnik.net/calendar/?year=2026&layout=aligned-weekd...
That's good, you should also give me a way to hide the modal to actually see the calendar before I go for printing. Nice work.
I just looked at the print preview in Firefox. Worked fine for me.
This is a really clever tool. I love the clean, one-page layout for tracking habits over a full year.
One suggestion: would it be possible to add a quarterly version? Like three months per page, or separate pages for each quarter? It'd be great for shorter-term goals without everything feeling so crammed on one sheet.
Thanks for making and sharing this!
Here's a [Danish spoken] page to make a PDF calendar for any year in Danish, English, Norwegian, or Swedish: https://kalendersiden.dk/
Neat, but it takes two pages on printing in the landscape orientation in Firefox on either A4 or US letter paper sizes here, with minimal font size set to 16. Generally matching of text dimensions to container dimensions is unreliable if you take into account browser settings (not just minimal font size, but also things like differing fonts and disabled custom fonts), and perhaps an SVG image with pre-rendered texts would be more appropriate for such a task. Or even a more pages-oriented format, and for different paper sizes.
I did something, much simpler, some time back in Google Sheets. Around year-end, I go and edit the location of the starting dates each month (drag around, some formatting). I also like the weekdays lined up instead. Use it more as a bigger-picture timeline/schedule for the year, for the family, and me.
Here is the template from last year that I shared with friends. If you are looking at it, take this as a base or an idea and build on it — finances, big life events, travel, etc.
The “Year” tab is kinda like a big-picture plan of where family members are in their years, education, and, hence, significant life events. As the months go by in the year, just fold/hide that portion.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YwAf8vgVR0FbTU6n1dVO...
PS. I’m tinkering with moving to a plainer text format this year, in MarkDown planning for a 10-year, 20-year, 30-years, and then kinda brain-simulation of what might be in 50 or even 100 years after I’m gone. I plan for the family/generation as an entity and I just insert myself as one of the role in it. ;-)
This is a very smart idea. Life orienteering, we are all running in life and some predefined checkpoints would be nice.
For those living in other parts of the world here ya go:
https://neatnik.net/calendar/?sofshavua=1&year=2026
Append `&sofshavua=1` to the URL.
Interesting. Sofshavua means weekend in Hebrew.
This is like a video that I saw where a carpenter uses very high end equipment and skills to create a phone holder to be placed on a desk.
We ran out of real work and real problems.
Tech and machinery is far ahead of the needs of humanity. Yes, you can create and print a single page calendar or carve out a phone holder, but when you think of it's usage, you are not going to need it - YAGNI.
There are proven advantages to hand-writing out notes and planning on paper over digital tools - the physical, tactile experience engages your brain in different ways, and this has been proven by multiple studies.
Digital tools are great. They're why they're here. But a lot of people want paper for good reasons, and it's a very different experience to wanting a wooden holder for your phone.
I agree on the benefits of tactile experience. But it need not come from paper, which is very modern thing. Information is being sucked out from real world, into digital space. College teachers are no longer writing on blackboards. Money is no longer a physical thing. Work is being done in virtual spaces. The only things that are left in physical world are the information-less objects, just like how the world was before invention of writing.
When information finds its natural habitat in the digital space, we need to re-orient ourselves.
This is BRILLIANT!! Thank You. Such as simple idea I wonder I have never thought of doing it myself. I currently have Stick notes to do list but it is a little messy with some date on it.
The older I am, the more I use good old fashion analogue tools like pencil and paper.
Saw this last year and liked it so much I added something very similar to it to Infumap (https://github.com/infumap/infumap). You can drag items of arbitrary type onto dates. When more than one item is associated with a date, a numbered button appears; clicking it lets you cycle through them. Items can be pages or links to pages, which when clicked show the page as a popup. Calendar pages in the parent page display as a list of all items scheduled for the next seven days.
I've used a Google Sheet exactly like this. Highlighted weekends and laid out with all days of the year. Export as PDF can fit on a single sheet of paper. But I also print it out on a huge paper and hang it up for my family. [https://bettersheets.co/bigyear]
This is really nice. I keep track of most important habits to me like how often I go to gym, how much protein I eat everyday, and how many days I read (books), on something physical (pen and paper). Mostly on monthly calendars. This would make tracking each of them separately on a single piece of paper across the entire year pretty neat.
Now i have printed the year my wife has born, I will mark her birthday only and give it to her as a gift. Thank you!
As an enhancement, it would be cool to be able to spread into multiple pages. 1 month per page, or 2 months per page, ..., 12 months per page.
It's hard to write on such small boxes.
I used to make these for myself and found them very helpful for planning out the year. Mine had only one difference, which was aligning the days of the week between each month.
In Sweden this format is called Hallon-almanackan (the raspberry almanack). I build an implementation here: thttps://hallonalmanackan.kodare.com/
Very nice, but on an A4 sheet the last row is cut off and you need to manually shrink it
I've used recalendar.js the past few years for my eInk devices:
https://github.com/klimeryk/recalendar.js
What does the dark background mean? I could only see it inside my print preview (see Fiveplus comment). Otherwise I like.
Saturday and Sunday. Looking at the source, it also accepts `sofshavua=1` options to highlight Fridays and Saturdays instead.
Oh duh, parsed it wrong - too used to 30day calendar views.
I like the highlighting of weekends, but wish the weekends aligned across months.
https://neatnik.net/calendar/?year=2026&layout=aligned-weekd...
great idea, just printed it out and this will do for my calendar next year!
Wow, I love this! Great job man
Nice. It would be nice to have an option to create a per month print as well.
Is it just me, or can't you close the big pop-in welcome info box on firefox ?
I had the same reaction and I think you are not supposed to close it. Just go Menu -> Print (Ctrl+P) and you will see it without the box.
Adding one letter to the day of the week would be way less confusing.
No need to look too closely, now ;)
I think they mean writing Tu Th Sa Su instead of T T S S (personally I'm a fan of T / theta if I'm doing single-letter abbreviations but Sat/Sun is still not the best)
Thorn, Þ, seems a more natural choice. The rune is called thurs, even.
I guess there's katakana Sa サ and Su ス, if that's an improvement.
Maybe we should all adopt Chinese weekday names: Sunday (星期日) remains same, Firstday (星期一) for Monday, Seconday (星期二) for Tuesday, Thirday (星期三) for Wednesday, Fourthday (星期四) for Thursday, Fifthday (星期五) for Friday and Sixthday (星期六) for Saturday. One-letter abbreviations would be simply S, 1 through 6.
I believe that's how Russian names the days as well. In Hebrew and Arabic we do the same, but Sunday is First Day, Monday is Second Day, etc.
Why downvoted? This is correct.
Print? Paper? Jot down with what? My calendar in the cloud performs these functions far better (from my perspective and work habits).
P.S. Maybe I should just remove the part in parentheses, since a number of people are completely ignoring it.
You're likely being downvoted not because there's anything wrong with having an opinion but because this feels like a low effort comment that contributes little to nothing, and comes across as quite negative and dismissive[0]. There's nothing to engage with or spark curiosity and the parentheses don't help with that.
[0]: Surely you know what printing and paper are, and how someone would jot something down, so that part comes across as ridiculing the idea.
Patronizing speculation on the reasons for downvotes (who gaf about such things? And for that matter I had a net gain today despite this) contributes nothing of value and explicitly violates one of HN's guidelines: "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
I attempted to jocularly make a point (e.g., I don't carry a pen or pencil and I almost never print anything, and I'm far from the only person who has made this sort of change in life practice) and the parenthetical was supposed to help to understand what it was and ward off the sort of criticism you're making, but apparently it was futile or even backfired, as it seems that a lot of people missed it and lashed out with hostility ... they should consider https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/6k68hi/the_prin....
> Surely you know what printing and paper are, and how someone would jot something down, so that part comes across as ridiculing the idea.
See, you completely and uncharitably misunderstood what I was attempting to convey. Yes, of course I know what those things are, but I no longer use them. People would jot things down with a pen or pencil, but that requires having a pen or pencil handy ... I almost never do, as a matter of ==> my <== work habits. That's the whole point of the parenthetical--that this is ==> my <== perspective. It doesn't "ridicule" people who do things differently, but it does allude to the fact that the world has changed (radically, speaking as a lifelong early adopter and a pioneer developer [I'm mentioned in RFC #57] for the last 3/4 century ... so much for insults that get thrown my way--including on HN today--as a "boomer" on a regular basis).
I won't comment on this again.
Which calendar is that? I haven’t found one with a decent year view similar to the one here.
Give it a shot.