Yearly Ten

Ten Things to Help You Schedule 2012

Freeware caution: always scan free downloads of anything for bugs and other threats before dumping the programs into your hard drive.

Calendar Magic is "an easy-to-use program that is entertaining, informative, educational and of equal applicability in the home and in the office" (OS: Designer notes "Calendar Magic has been tested on Windows 95, 98, Me, XP, Vista (32-bit) and Windows 7 (32-bit and 64-bit), and has also been reported to run without problems on other versions of Windows")

Calme is "made for creating and printing beautifully looking monthly planners, yearly planners and picture calendars in minutes. Creating individual calendars by choosing your own colors, picture themes, fonts, borders and your own personal photos is very easy. You can download holidays right out of the application and display them in your calendars. It is also possible to change your calendar language. Many languages from all over the world are available" (OS: Win 9x/NT/2000/XP/Vista/7)

Desktop Calendar is a "small calendar and event reminder that unobtrusively sits on your desktop and is ready to use any time. No taskbar button or system tray icon. The calendar is transparent so it's not an eyesore and consumes very little memory. Enter as many daily or regular reminders as you like. Float your mouse over a day to see all reminders for the day. Shows a short list of upcoming reminders below the calendar. Fonts, colours and tooltips are customisable so it blends in with your desktop colour and font schemes" (OS: Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7)

Easy Diary allows you to "write your memories or appointments with ease. Easy Diary saves your data only in your own computer and helps you keep them private. Features: multi-user supported; every single user unlocks his/her data by using his/her password; you can search your data; interface is customizable; backup import & export is provided" (OS: Windows XP/Vista/7)

My Diary is "reliable for storing everyday blogs or journals. Your diary is password protected, and blogs are encrypted using a simple yet powerful encryption algorithm to ensure that your journals are secured. myDiary automatically saves as you type so you don´t have to worry about saving. It´s very simple and easy to use - enter your password, pick a date, start typing. It´s that easy!" (OS: Win 98/NT/XP/Vista/Windows 7, Linux, designer notes it also requires Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0.)

The free Lite version of Rainlendar is "a customizable calendar that displays the current month, events, and reminders. It is a very lightweight application that doesn´t use much system resources or take much space on your desktop" (OS: Windows XP/2003/Vista/7)

SSuite Office My Calendar Diary Portable is a portable calendar and diary for people on the go (OS: all Windows and USB devices)

There's an interesting concept behind Stay Focused freeware: "If you would like to concentrate on your daily stuff, Stayfocused is your choice. The idea of Stayfocused is based on The Pomodoro Technique®. The root of the idea is that you work for 25 minutes straight and then break for 5 minutes" (OS: Windows XP/Vista/7)

UK's Kalendar is "a MS Windows program intended to remind you of upcoming events and todos. There are several views for your dates that are organized similar to a calendar sheet. Dates and appointments can be entered into the calendar via an input form. You can enter a forewarn time, so as long as "UK´s Kalender" is running in the background you´ll be reminded of your dates as soon as the forewarn time is reached. Independent from the calendar function there is also a todo list where you can enter tasks with a deadline and a forewarn time. If the forewarn time is reached, "UK´s Kalender" will inform you of the due tasks with symbols and colors" (OS: Windows 98/ME/2000/XP/2003/Vista/7)

The free Lite version of VueMinder Calendar is a "calendar and reminder program for Windows. It supports multiple calendars displayed simultaneously in layers. These can be viewed and printed by day, week, or month. They can also be visually distinguished using unlimited combinations of fonts, background colors, and gradient styles. It also integrates a semitransparent calendar into your Windows desktop, so you´ll always be able to see your upcoming events" (OS: Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7)

While I prefer my paper calendars I'm still using some scheduling freeware: RedNotebook for writing schedules, deadlines, editing task lists and so forth, and Chaos Manager for personal & family scheduling. I recommend both as useful, practical electronic schedule keepers.

Cool Calendars

I admit, I'm a calendar junkie. Every year I go out and buy a year's supply (I wait until after January 1st so I can get them at a discount) for the entire family. They are not as vigilant as I am about keeping them updated -- the slackers -- but it satisfies my ever-constant need for organization. If you're going to the brick and mortars, BAM and B&N always seem to have a nice selection, and Borders usually offers theirs with excellent discounts after January 1st.

I have found if I get calendars with themes that appeals to my victims loved ones, they are more apt to use them. So I look for nature or beach scenes for my guy, puppies for my daughter and anything Asian for the college kid. For myself I buy some type of quilt-themed wall calendar -- this because they almost always come with free patterns -- a purse-size pocket planner and a lay-flat, desk-size notebook type for my office desk.

I've never before made my own calendar, though, so in keeping with my "try new things" outlook for 2011 I decided to see how hard it was to put one together. Not difficult at all, as it turns out. Microsoft Word 2007 allows me to access and download online templates from their site, so I found a simple one to use. I inserted a blank page between each month and on those inserted an interesting photo from my collection.

The whole thing took about thirty minutes, and the resulting calendar came out great, as you can see here. I was just playing, but I think doing something like this for readers would be an excellent New Year's gift from an author, especially those of you who do a lot of booksignings, conferences and that kind of thing (I'm thinking you could also mark upcoming release dates with a cover thumbnail inserted into the appropriate calendar date block, although I haven't tried that myself.)

One suggestion: I didn't resize the photos I used for the example calendar, so most of them are really too hi-rez for printing (they also make the file over 4 MB in size; rather huge for a 25-page document.) If you're going to use digital or scanned photos for a calendar you want folks to print out, resize them first to an easily-printable resolution before you insert them in your doc.

Other calendar resources:

The simple but wonderful Chaos Manager freeware designed by Martin Bresson was such a huge help to me in 2010 I'm going to keep using it as my virtual calendar/reminder program for 2011. I've got my guy hooked on it now, too.

Veranda Magazine's February 2011 issue comes with a lovely free calendar featuring their amazing photography; I'm putting this one in the kitchen because it's attractive, not too big and yet it has decent-size blocks to write on.

Calendar Freeware fom the Freebies page: 1 year * Calendar.exe * Calendar Magic * Calendars & Planners * Chandler * Easy HR Popup Calendar * MiniMinder * Multi-Reminders * Rainlendar Lite Remind Me Please * Sunbird * TaskPrompt * TKexe Kalendar