Print your own diary.

06 Jul 2007

I apologise now for the very specific geekery of this post. You all know what I’m like.

I have trouble with diaries. I’ve tried going digital with PDAs and things a few times, but keep coming back to paper for all sorts of reasons.

My problem is that I’m really picky about it. The layout, the quality of the thing - I tend to make them fall apart. In order to find one that suits, I’ve bought three this year, and none of them is perfect.

So, having stumbled across a website called DIYplanner.com (seriously, is there anything anyone can think of that isn’t on the interweb somewhere already?), I’ve decided that if I’m going to be so awkward about it, I may as well put together my own.

And having time on my hands on account of being in the throes of a job-hunt, I went ahead…

And here’s the result. What I like is to have the week on the left-hand page, faced by a plain lined page for notes/lists/whatever.

Thumbnaail of my diary page

The ‘legal’ bit: These are by me, Mark Goody, enabled by the DIY Planner Widget Kit v0.6 by Doug Johnson of DIYplanner.com, and they are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

The ‘how’: To use them you’ll need PDF reader software, like Acrobat Reader or Mac OS X Preview. The PDFs contain an about page for reference, a generic lined page you can use for notes layed out for right-hand (odd) pages - or you can print in anything you like from elsewhere. The rest of each file contains a series of dated, week-to-page left-handed pages to face your notes/to-dos/whatever.

Select the page-range of the weekly pages and print them to your evens. Flip ‘em however your printer needs, and print your choice of odd pages. Easy.

In two sizes (A5 and half-US Letter), we have files for the rest of 2007 (July-December):