cutesy organizing

Lately I've been trying to make a better effort to prettify my desk at work a bit. I find it helps my motivation to have some nicer things to look at than just piles of journal articles and Matlab code printouts. I started printing out monthly calendars to pin up - these are good for showing an overview of the meetings/deadlines that are coming up for the month, and helps me stay on top of life a bit better. But, I wanted them to be more than just a boring black and white grid. There are multiple places you can download free PDF calendars that you could then modify to add your meetings, but I didn't like the aesthetics of them much. Plus, adding in of my meetings seemed like a pain.

Then I discovered that Google calendar allows you to save your monthly calendars to PDF format. This is great for me since I use Google calendar for both work and personal scheduling. If I'm doing this at work, it's not something I want to spend a lot of time on, and this option automatically includes all the meetings that I already have on my various calendars. Plus, I like the layout; it's nice and clean, Google style. I can even tweak the colors in the vector imaging software that I use at work to make it nice and girly looking on my desk :) Or, in the case of December, I can make it festive with red and green!

If you use Google calendar already, this is super easy to do. Just go to the month view, and if you have multiple calendars, make sure the calendars you want to include are selected. You can also change the colors here; I switched mine to red and green just for fun. Then, click on the "print" button, circled in orange here:

If you just want to do this quickly you could just print it out from here. If you are like me and feel the need to mess with fonts/formatting, you can click "save as", and save it as a PDF. I use Canvas to play with the fonts, take out some items that don't apply to me, and add in some shading to the days that are not in the month. For this one, I also stuck in a little holly sprig and used a scripty "December" font, for a touch of whimsy. I kinda need it right now in the middle of this grant mess at work. ha.

This was done pretty quickly. With more time, I think it would be fun to play around with making yearly calendars to print out through one of the online photo printing services. Would make for nice gifts too.. if I ever magically stumble upon some untapped source of spare time to use.

I will put this up tomorrow, adding a tiny touch of Christmasy decor for me, keeping with my baby steps towards Christmas plan :)  Bonus: getting to see the holiday parties planned throughout the month!