Your year on one page
The simple calendar app that gives you a bird’s-eye view of all your plans
Yearful is a simple calendar app that makes it easy to plan and share your events and projects for the whole year; color-coded to give a bird’s-eye view.
Yearful started out as a solution to a problem I had tracking my billable days for my freelance work. I do a lot of work for large financial institutions and they tend to prefer monthly invoices; this made it essential to keep track of which days I worked and which I didn’t.
As a busy person, I found it was way too easy to forget to record this on a day-to-day or even a weekly basis, and would end up having to try to reconstruct my timeline from memory. If I got this wrong I’d end up billing too much and this would not reconcile with what the client recorded – or bill too little and end up doing myself out money that was owed. It was therefore pretty important to have a good system for storing and editing this information.
I tried to find a software tool that would help me track this – essentially a calendar view with one cell per day for the whole year. But I couldn’t find anything useful. Calendar apps all seem to be focused on weekly/monthly views and appointment times, and that just didn’t really suit my needs. I was already flicking week to week to figure out where I’d been; I didn’t necessarily care about the times involved, I just needed high-level days, or maybe half-days.
My search fruitless, I decided to just knock up a spreadsheet solution myself. It was a bit of a faff to create the complete year and get the right dates lined up with the correct days of the week, but it only needed to be done once a year so that was manageable, especially considering all the admin time I was saving during the year. And once I had the template it wasn’t too onerous to create the subsequent years. I would block out the weekend and bank holiday dates as these were non-working days for me, and then block out the working days in another color. If I took a day off or saw a different client I’d assign another color to the appropriate cell(s).
