Unsolicited Marketing Advice

With the start of a new year, it’s time to take control by making your calendar a tool for proactive planning. Here’s the challenge and an excellent solution to production planning:

The Challenge
When planning print production projects or newsletters, it’s often necessary to back into deadlines from an established delivery date. Or conversely, one has to plan forward for copywriting, layout, approvals and printing to know when delivery is possible. Such planning is a challenge with normal month-by-month calendars, even if they’re all printed on one sheet for easy reference.

A Solution
Dave Seah’s Compact Calendar makes production planning easier for marketers and public relations professionals by stringing all the year’s dates together on one long page with the weekends pushed to the right side in gray. Months and weeks of the year are indicated to the left of the main column of dates, while holidays are indicated by a colored numeral on the calendar.

The result is a most excellent production planning calendar that makes it easy to calculate “number of weeks out,” scan for conflicts by days of the work week, and identify when holidays fall inside of a production timeline. Seah provides the calendar as a Microsoft Excel file, so you can modify it to meet your particular needs, such as adding holidays, or even tweaking it to display subsequent years, if desired.

It can be effective to use the compact calendar to scribble on as your developing your production timeline, or you can go down to your local Kinko’s and have it printed as a yard-long, 10-inch wide wall calendar that you can view from across the cubicle (consider printing on outdoor banner vinyl for durability and adding your company’s logo). In addition, people have posted international variations of Dave’s calendar to his web site, so if you’re in someplace like Malaysia, there may already be a version in the proper language and with local holidays.

Additional Links

• David Seah’s Compact Calendar download page
• LifeHacker post about the compact calendar
• How to use the compact calendar with a moleskin
• How Jerry Seinfeld uses a calendar as a habit-building, productivity tool
• David Seah’s filmstrip calendar for elapsed calendar time on a monospaced display (a bit geeky)
• Downloadable Microsoft Word calendar templates – 2008, academic year, multi-year and other special-use options
• Okidata-compatible customizable planning calendar templates for Microsoft Word
• DIY Planner – Printable forms in various sizes (including Hipster PDA) for time management, GTD, project planning, checklists and note-taking.

Labels: Productivity

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© 2009 Warren Allan Johnson
Posted by Warren Allan Johnson @ 6:00 PM | Permalink | |

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