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Show HN: Minimalist Calendars Generator

useminimal.com

87 pointsbjarocki46 comments

Like a lot of calendars, this has a big focus on months yet the only monthly schedules I have are passive and operate in the background: salary in, bills out.

When it comes to organising my life the cycle of week to week planning is by far the most important one. Where we are in that cycle at any given moment in time — what day of the week it is — is much more important than knowing the current month. Shopping for food, planning vacations, the school year, meetings, socialising — all happen per week or over the course of weeks, and never per month or over the course of months.

The challenge then is to produce a calendar where the months are as incidental as the phase of the moon or the numeric value of current day, and where the focus is on the shape of the week and the space, in weeks, between events and date ranges. (Ironically, weeks and lunar cycles are closely related, so it might actually be cool/fun/unique to focus on lunar cycles while pivoting to a week-on-week format.)

What is the best calendar shape that handles this?

(The site that you’ve built around the calendar is superbly executed btw.)

Not sure about calendar shape but obsidian has weekly notes you can use to structure and plan your weeks.

Visually for me it would be a vertical list that starts from Monday to Sunday.

https://github.com/liamcain/obsidian-periodic-notes

I was looking for the same as this. I wanted a yearly overview where the emphasis was on weeks so I could plan vacations and the school year. I ended up creating a pet project to do exactly this that may be of use to you. I’m interested in your thoughts? https://calii.tiimo.app/

do you have any sketch of how this could look like? I'd be happy to build it! and thank you, it's still very early version though

I'm 100% sure I saw a calendar that was 7 columns as days, 52 rows as weeks, every day was just a number, no borders or anything, months were separated with a line and every first day of month was with a shade/gradient. It was only on the left third/quarter of a vertical paper so the right part was left for notes.

Took a while to find: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37869809

Maybe this will fit the bill? https://davidseah.com/node/compact-calendar/

(Was on HN 2 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37869809)

Google calendar in the 4-week view has always been my choice for this. A two-week view with some more detail per day would be even better, I think.

I'm experimenting with printable, 2-week calendars, which contains space for adding retrospective items throughout the week. I'd like to add weekly recurring items to it, would like to keep the overall appearance clean - making it easy to write on it.

I'd love your feedback and ideas to improve it.

https://jonathan.rogivue.net/tools/2-week-calendar/2-Week%20...

(I'm happy to share the design files - Affinity Designer & SVG)

One size does not fit all. For planning and reflecting on life events, weekly is immensely useful over monthly.

My goto calendar is a letter size page (landscape oriented) with 5 columns.

One column for each week. One page per month. Dates/SMTWTFS go on top row.

Each column (week) gets agenda style entries. pseudo ordered. with just the date and events.

My usecase is primarily logging life events after the fact for reflection and self improvement than planning the future.

This format scales well, needs just pen and paper (no printer, i just draw the lines and put the start of the week day/date per column).

Low pressure, a year is captured in 12 pages. I reviewa very rarely but its there when I need and I can eyeball my way down the calendar without any search capabilities.

I split the page into top half for personal and bottom half for work.

It just works.

Another fun one is: https://neatnik.net/calendar/

From the site:

> If you print this page, you’ll get a nifty calendar that displays all of the year’s dates on a single page. It will automatically fit on a single sheet of paper of any size. For best results, adjust your print settings to landscape orientation and disable the header and footer.

A neat idea.

I wish there was a way to select a different year (by appending it to the url, for instance).

https://neatnik.net/calendar/?year=2024

https://neatnik.net/calendar/?year=2025

From the README [0]:

""" By default, the current year is used. You can override the year by supplying a year parameter, e.g. /calendar.php?year=2027. """

[0] https://github.com/neatnik/calendar

Thanks!

Looks neat.

Just wanted to add that on Linux/Unix (including MacOS), typing "cal" into the terminal also gives you a calendar. And there are arguments you can pass in to make it display a specific month or year.

I built a calendar generator with TS and headless Chrome so I can print my own stuff. Plan to add more in the future. Let me know what do you think!

It's all free.

>Yearly and monthly, simple 2024 printable calendar available

>in A4 and A5 formats in both portrait and landscape.

You probably want to also output Letter page size if you're interested in targeting the US market.

good point. i'm not sure if I ever gonna try to monetize this but it should be fairly easy to add it, will do

don't know if you care, but the US do rotate the columns for their weekdays...

do you mean that week starts with Sun?

yes

When I click download, only a payment window pops up and there is no option to download. Otherwise, your calendars look pretty clean!

just put 0 where the price is and and you'll get the link via email, no payment needed :)

You can enter a price of zero. But even after I figured that out I didn't want to enter my email. The "Download for free" button is deceptive and left a bad taste. I'm not going to give my email to someone engaging in deception.

I'm sorry you feel that way. It was just easy to put that thing on Lemon Squeezy to see if there are people willing to pay for this. If you don't want to put your real email use something like this - https://temp-mail.org/. many people do, it's ok.

If you like this, definitely check out Pocket Mod

https://pocketmod.com/

This is neat.

I've looked at many calendar styles that fit my needs - minimal and straightforward yet adhering to the custom quirks I wanted. I ended up with a Spreadsheet (Google Sheets) where I align the weekends (SAT/SUN) by moving the Month's start date up/down. It helps me get a bird's eye view of the critical events this/next year and tentative plans - such as travels, visas, weddings, reunions, and other events where work and family inter-twins.

It helps me look at the coming year (e.g., 2024), a few months behind (2023), and the next (2025). In the spreadsheet, I have one sheet ("Years") that marks years against significant events for the family, such as the tentative kids' graduations, college, retirement, how old is someone which year, and, of course, the likely year behind which I might no longer be operational.

For instance, I can look up where and what stage we might be in the years 2030, 2040, and 2050. Heck, I have the years dragged all the way to 2100. I'm definitely not alive to see that, but it is fun to see what year it is if you can hit 100 or what it is going to be when I hit 80.

This is, of course, only for the big-picture items. The daily, weekly, and monthly go to the calendar, and the perpetual to-do in plain text. And I know that everything will go differently than the plan -- the idea is to build an idea maze of what ifs and then the repercussions of the events that can unfold in the future. It is fun; go and play the mind game this Sunday.

I had used David Shea's[1] printables for a very long time. Well, even some of the printables I made for my use and kids' are inspired by his work.

I just forked and cleaned out a bare sheet for 2024. I hope this is helpful to someone to start from or get inspired to do their own versions -- https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YwAf8vgVR0FbTU6n1dVO...

1. https://davidseah.com

I wonder how the Americans feel that the weeks begin on Monday :)

I wanted to figure out where the developer is from (presumably Europe because of the use of A4/A5), the terms of services is just a template, e.g. (not being judgemental, I found it amusing):

> Contact Us: If you have any questions or concerns about our Privacy Policy, please contact us at [insert company email address].

Edit: less amusing is the "download for free" button opening a credit card input field. I can enter 0.00 as payment, but it still wants my email address. Maybe I can enter "[Insert buyer e-mail address here]"? The Etsy store's owner's name sounds Polish.

yeah it was hacked quickly together. Eventually I'll make it possible to just save as pdf from the browser but for now, if you don't feel like leaving the email is an option, use some temp email service. I'm from Pl, yes

Regarding start of the week, will do that, I think browsers added support for checking that recently. Sorry folks, 99% of the world uses Monday ;)

I think it’s more like 70 percent, given that apparently India starts the week with Sunday as well: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Week

American calendar weeks begin on Sunday in order to break up free time as a concept - and make work front & center. Oh how obnoxious & boring.

I think it’s because the Jewish (and therefore the Christian) week traditionally starts on Sunday.

That being said, I like having the week start on Sunday (despite Germany starting weeks on Mondays) because I can just open the calendar app on Sunday night and see if I have any appointments early on Monday morning without switching weeks.

I’ve always been partial to the candy bar format: https://davidseah.com/node/compact-calendar/

Sorry to hijack this, I thought it can do the following when I see this thread but apparently not: is there a good option to generate calendar from, say, iCal? I want to be able to generate a PDF from calendar events and I fail to find a good solution that can reliably automatically typeset it. I look for some from LaTeX but it seems to not be the right tool for these tasks.

(When I say automatic typesetting, it includes eg when some events are too long and need to wrap.)

What are some good looking year-view wall calendars? The ‘at-a-glace’ stuff and related things you find at staples etc look too businessy for my taste. Anyone have pointers to better options? I like the clean design of the OP’s calendar pages.

Bug: https://neatnik.net/calendar/?year=1752

What's the issue? I can print out all the years in one go now.

Wikipedia says: "In the British Empire, it was the only year with 355 days, as September 3–13 were skipped when the Empire adopted the Gregorian calendar."

Ohhh

Reminds a lot of Kal by https://kal-store.com/

Poster, is there a source to your calendar? I want to add language that is not in the list.

not yet, I'll open source it eventually though. what language you'd like to see?

Sourashtra

also check out DaveSeah.com > The printable CEO series of templates

the compact calendar, and emergent task planner have been my favorites

thanks for feedback everyone!

changes i'm gonna make: 1. allow to configure & print calendars directly from the website - here I anticipate I'll spot some cross browser hell but we'll see how that works 2. i'll add habit trackers - something very much wip is visible under https://useminimal.com/habit-trackers 3. i'll think about weekly calendars and planners

once I have more themes I'll add a paywall with one time payment to access everything with no time limit ie. every year you'd be able to generate new calendars etc. the 'simple' theme will be always free, maybe more

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