Do you ever feel like time is always just slipping away?
You start off the year feeling confident and ready to take on your goals. Then you blink and somehow it’s already June. You tell yourself you’ve got all summer to make plans and work toward your goals, and then suddenly it’s October and you’re wondering where it all went.
The truth is: most of us are running after time, not working with it.
But what if you could get a clearer view of where your time is actually going before it flies past?
A year at a glance calendar view doesn’t just help you plan more efficiently. It helps you plan more mindfully. It shows you your time in context so you can prioritize what matters, protect it and feel more in control.
Summer always feels long… until it’s over
My husband and I love camping by the lake during the summer. Our ideal is to go every two weeks or so. But summer also brings other things – meetups with friends, weekend festivals, family obligations, travel. It’s easy to say, “No big deal, we’ve got all summer.”
But when we actually looked at our year at a glance calendar view we quickly realized something: over the course of the entire summer, we only have four free weekends that could realistically work for camping.
Four.
And that’s assuming the weather cooperates.
That perspective instantly changes how we will treat those weekends. We don’t give them away lightly. We protect them, we look forward to them, and we savor them. That’s the power of seeing your time clearly – you appreciate it more and you make better decisions with it.
Why weekly and monthly views aren’t enough
Most calendar tools (Google, Apple, Notion – you name it) keep you zoomed in on the day, the week, the month. And that’s fine for handling logistics. But it doesn’t give you the full picture.
You can easily fall into the trap of overbooking yourself without realizing it. Maybe you plan a big event at the end of one month, only to accidentally schedule another high-energy obligation three days later in the next. It felt “weeks apart” when you booked it… but they’re actually back-to-back.
A year at a glance calendar view lets you:
- See upcoming busy periods before they sneak up on you
- Spread out major projects and commitments more strategically
- Avoid surprises and last-minute crunches
- Plan goals and reverse engineer milestones over the long-term
- Make space for the things that matter most to you
It’s not just about managing time better, it’s about living more intentionally. Instead of reacting to your schedule, you start designing it.
Remember the giant year at a glance calendars on the wall?
Before everything went digital, you might’ve seen those massive wall calendars that showed all 12 months at once. They weren’t pretty, but they worked. You may still see them occasionally on doctors’ office walls or in classrooms. They helped people plan ahead, coordinate team efforts, and visualize projects and vacations all in one place.
That long-term visibility mattered – and still does. But with more people working from home, most of us lost that year at a glance overview.
My husband and I used to print our own basic version at home each January with dates only, no specific events. We’d highlight weekends and public holidays and pencil in vacation days to help with planning. But inevitably, it got out of date. Plans changed, trips moved and we’d forget to update it.
What we really needed was a way to keep that year at a glance perspective alive without the hassle of starting from scratch every time something changed.
Easy ways to try a year at a glance calendar for yourself
You don’t need to change your whole system to get started. Here are a few simple options:
- Print it out: Download or sketch a 12-month grid and highlight the big stuff: vacations, deadlines, school breaks, birthdays.
- Use a spreadsheet: Create a one-pager where you can block out seasons or availability. Ali Abdaal breaks down how he does this in this video.
- Try a digital tool like Glance. It connects with your Google Calendar and shows you all your real events in a clean year at a glance view that syncs automatically. It’s free and only takes a couple minutes to set up.
Final thoughts: Time is finite. Make it count.
Time will always feel like it’s moving fast. But a year at a glance calendar view can help you slow things down and feel more in control of your time.
It helps you spot patterns, protect what matters, and plan with intention. It turns time into something you actively shape, not just something that happens to you.
So whether you start with paper or a digital tool, I highly recommend giving this a try. That one small shift in perspective can completely change the way you use your time and how you feel about it.
If you give this a try, I’d love to hear about your experience! Reach out to me on X or send me an email.