Every once in a while I’ll enter a season where there’s a lot going on and it helps to have a big high-level view of the landmark events and deadlines over the next few months.
I usually do this via a whiteboard, but I’d like to make it digital and have it with me everywhere. However, in my experience, calendar apps do a very poor job of showing this kind of high-level view. For instance, here’s Fantastical:
(Hopefully that screenshot worked; trying to embed from CleanShot to get around the ongoing image-upload issues!)
I could make it more functional by changing a bunch of view settings (font size, enabling task-in-calendar in settings, etc.) but reconfiguring the view whenever I want to switch between “long-term” and “short-term” is untenable.
So, I’m wondering: how do you approach this? Should I just pick up a whiteboard marker?
I do exactly what you do, use Fantastical in quarterly view. I completely agree that the view isn’t ideal, because there is very little space to fit multiple events. As a work around, I have created a few ‘planning’ only additional calendars and have a specific ‘calendar set’ to show only these (it seems you do the same). This works ok for planning projects over longer stretches, e.g. single weeks devoted to single chapters of a book. It doesn’t work for anything more granular, e.g. multiple events per day.
The other major tool I use is the Kanban plugin in Obsidian. I really just have one, tracking academic writing projects from conception to publication through a few key stages.
Last time I checked, the ONE PLANNER to rule them all doesn’t exist. I toyed with Trello some years back which also had calendar views (plugins) but it didn’t work well. I gave up checking and trying other such management tools. So I hop between the calendar, Obsidian Kanban, and ToDoist, hoping that some day, some app will alleviate my woes.
Maybe I’m missing something but why not just look at the standard calendar view? What benefit is there from seeing it all on one screen?
Personally I just scroll up and down in the standard calendar app and can see about 5 weeks at a time on one screen view when I am displaying a month.
I do have some things that are scheduled for months and even years in advance. I just add them to the calendar as normal.
FWIW One year I did try the paper calendar with the entire year running together. Like this one but there are other places to get them.
I didn’t find it at all helpful. Even with it right where I could see it by just turning my head it became outdated almost immediately and I always used my digital calendar for scheduling and seeing what was coming up.
Why not try a different calendar app? And use both apps; Fantastical as your “short-term” view and the other as your “long-term” view. Then each app can be configured for that specific view and there is no need to change. I get the sense that you are not using the “long-term” view often, so it is not likely you will be using/needing Fantastical’s various advanced features in that view and any inexpensive calendar app could work for you.
Heh. A seemingly-timely Focused episode just dropped:
(Not sure yet if David and Mike talk about this exact use-case)
I was thinking an Obsi plugin or two might work here. I’ll have to poke around! Kanban’s gotten a lot of great updates lately.
Cognitive load, I suppose. I have found it helpful when teaching multiple courses in a semester to visualize the entire term, for instance. If I were to try to scroll the term I’d have forgotten the first few weeks by the time I’m looking at the final exams.
Yes! But… which alternative app? Haha. I am playing with Busycal this morning. It might work — it certainly has a few ways of making the month view more “wall-calendar-like” than Fantastical does.
My primary calendar stays in Month view, but I use the Schedule view on my iPhone because that’s what I check first in the morning. I look at my day then scroll forward to see what is coming. I have reminders set well in advance of big events, etc.
I rely on my Focused paper calendar for this big picture view. I get the laminated calendar and use “wet erase” markers to add my events so that I can erase them if needed. I don’t put everything on this calendar, only the big events (I’m teaching a multi-day class, traveling to my nephew’s wedding, etc.). I look at it when I’m scheduling something to make sure I don’t make a stupid mistake.
This may be pretty low tech, but could you just take a fullscreen screenshot of Fantastical exactly how you want it? Save it with the updated date and then you can mark it up over time as things change? You could also just link to it with any apps you use. Maybe weekly or monthly adjust Fantastical and then just take another screenshot?
Or take screenshots of each month. Then stitch them together in one image?
Another way of looking at it might be some sort of Project Planning GANTT chart. That way, you might be able to get a clearer idea of when “milestones” clash and a better feel for prioritising what tasks need to be done on what project.
Having said that, I didn’t find a successful implementation when I was trying to manage several clashing projects at once.
Omnifocus was really good for managing individual projects but not really for “At a glance” viewing across projects - especially for advance planning over a longer timeframe. Omniplan promises something like this but at the cost of the PRO plan.
I have the sense - but would love to be corrected - that is the case with most of the project management-type apps. For example, this video shows ProWorkflow’s Timeline function can display timelines across projects -
but it is a subscription product. I didn’t go ahead with it as I wasn’t feeling ready to shift from Fantastical / Calendars and Omnifocus partly because for the latter I have some Taskpaper templates set up for quick entry of a number of standard projects I have to set up.
I am not sure if Airtable.com’s feature allows the cross-project view but, if it does, it is also a subscription option.
If anyone has found a good solution, I would be interested to hear / read about them / it!
We have this exact conundrum at work and it bugs me that we haven’t found a solution. I refuse to believe the likes of Google and Microsoft and Apple haven’t figured out a way to do this with their many teams and competing time pressures - surely they must have something that shows the quarter or six month view of all chosen calendar events?!
Gantt charts are great but as @Wrothnie notes they fail when there are multiple projects being managed because we need to see all of it combined.
A little plus for BusyCal which isn’t what you asked but worth noting for relevant folk reading this thread: it has various calendar widgets for iOS and iPadOS including a 2 week view, which iCal doesn’t offer. It’s useful for getting that slightly longer look at what your time looks like for the next couple weeks.
