Master Your Time with the “Year at a Glance” Method

Time is our most valuable resource, yet managing it effectively can be a challenge. Enter the “Year at a Glance” method, a time management strategy where you plan your entire year in advance. This method provides an easy way to plan and schedule events and appointments throughout the year. This method has become very popular within the bullet journaling community, with some very beautiful-looking bullet journal spreads being created.

What is the “Year at a Glance” Method?

The “Year at a Glance” method is a calendar that displays all 12 months of the year on a single page or screen. This method provides an easy way to plan and schedule events and appointments throughout the year. It allows you to easily see how events and appointments are spaced out, helping to avoid conflicts and double-booking. It’s particularly useful for planning life on a large scale, like trips or holidays.

The point of this view is that you split up the entire year into these columns, so you end up with 12 columns that show the different months and then 1 to 31 down the side that show you the different dates, so what you end up with is these 366 blocks.

My Personal Experience with the “Year at a Glance” Method

Having tried bullet journaling through 2021, I found it insightful and very impactful towards my overall productivity, but the biggest change came from this year at a glance view as it gave me incredible insight and clarity over my year, changing the game and allowing me to be able to step back and get a bird’s eye view of what my entire year looked like. This came because this is not really a view that you particularly see very often due to having digital calendars keeping you stuck within the weekly or monthly views, and even if you have a physical annual calendar, you tend to flip the pages, so you never really see your entire year just laid out on a single page or two pages.

So, loving the view but not the amount of time bullet journaling was taking, I decided there needed to be a digital way of having this kind of view in my life. So, I created an Excel Spreadsheet out of it; these days, it is too easy to default toward finding a fancy app to do this, but there is no need to waste that time on it. A spreadsheet just does the job.

You can see that my template has the quarters colour-coded along with the weekends; it also has some code in the cells to allow you to change the year and dates easily and quickly.

Implementing this view into your planning will give you an amazing oversite of your year and time and complement your other productivity management systems to ensure that you protect your time and put it to use in the most effective way possible.

 If you would like a Free copy of my year-at-a-glance template, then just click the link below and you can download a copy to give this method a try for yourself.