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Drawing the Calendar
Tips for mapping your life
Sometime in the fall of last year I began to draw my calendar.
My weeks were packed with a series of interlocking jobs and I couldn’t keep them straight. Tiny calendars on my computer weren’t cutting it. I needed something tangible — I needed a calendar-as-artifact.
The drawn calendar is not for minutiae, but for overview, for the ability to both understand the rhythm of coming weeks at a glance, and for the pleasure of ticking off time.[1]
There are three ingredients to the drawn calendar:
- An off-white unruled notebook [2]
- A 0.5mm Copic MULTILINER SP Waterproof black pen
- C2 (light Cool Grey), C3 (medium Cool Grey), and R27 (Cadmium red) Copic Sketch Markers
With black, two shades of grey (you really only need one, but two is extra luxurious), and red, you can sketch out pretty much anything in the world, mock up almost any user interface, and — as it turns out — make a pretty gorgeous calendar.
As for drawing the lines? I eyeballed it in the beginning, but now use the edge of whatever paperback or postcard I have handy.
And so I drew my weeks. Admittedly, a strange thing to do. Why not just buy a calendar notebook? Well, at first because I was in the middle of Myanmar and I couldn’t buy one. But more importantly, because the act of drawing itself becomes a meditation, and slowing down to feel the shape of days and weeks to come carries an inherent value not found in the already-made.
My recipe — R27 highlighted black ink to block off major events: plane rides, job timeframes, deadlines. C2 to shade in the days as they pass. C3 for coloring headers or month markers. And black ink to sketch in — sometimes literally, with tiny drawings — meetings or momentous events.
My drawn calendar system evolved as I used it. The first iteration focused on work with only the thinnest mapping of my life rhythm. But I liked using the calendar so much that I added additional boxes within each day-box, and after 10…
