The case for a single-sheet calendar
(Zoom out and see the entire year on a piece of paper!)
Why use these printable calendars for marking habits & whatnot when we’ve got such powerful and convenient digital tools?
It’s about the satisfaction that comes with making a physical artifact. You keep it on your desk or pinned to a wall where you can’t avoid it, and every day you mark that date when you complete your daily habit (I recommend a highlighter). This is the way to focus on building one habit at a time.
In the grand endeavor of “improving your life by building habits” there are two failure modes: too much and not enough. If you’re managing to do this thing of starting healthy habits at all, then you’re not doing too little. Showing up is prerequisite to everything else. The other horn is starting too many new things at once.
When in a motivated mood, it is easy to decide to, eg, fix your sleep schedule, start eating better, inaugurate several exercise regimens, cut out sweets, start meditating, work consistently on a handful of important side projects, and learn to draw — all on the same day. But long experience shows that this well-intentioned scheme will inevitably collapse when your mental & physical systems get overwhelmed by all the effortful changes, possibly (embarrassingly…) 24 hours after they began.
The solution is simply to change one thing at a time. Focus on it exclusively for a month or two until it becomes routine & habitual. Then add on the next thing. (This limitation can also help make it psychologically possible to start, if you’re in the “not enough” camp. It’s just one small change.) Over time — and yes it can be frustrating to delay, but it’s more mentally sustainable — you’ll transform your daily routine.
Digital systems make it too easy to track too many habits. When each uses a full sheet of paper, there are only so many habits you can fit in your physical space and readily mark. The daily act of physically drawing a star also acts as a nice capstone habit, like saying “I did it!”
It’s important to focus on the little wins, or they’ll fade away like dust in the wind. Make them more salient to build evidence in your brain of what kind of person you are becoming.
And when you hit your target (or the year ends), you’re left with a wonderful physical record of how it went. Plus, there’s just something about paper and ink that feels more real than bits and bytes in a database, or pixels on a screen.
…
For more about habits, James Clear’s Atomic Habits is a modern classic.
And for more about systems of goal tracking, this blog post is what sparked my creation of this calendar sheet in the first place, back in April 2023. (I saw the image of their completed calendar and thought “this is a great idea, but man is that an ugly design” — and here we are.)
What is this “ZVC” calendar?
The Zorunios Veneer Calendar — but let’s continue abbreviating it as ZVC. (And yes, we will often commit the mild sin of RAS syndrome.)
ZVC is not a calendar reform. Instead, it’s what I’m calling a “veneer calendar”: a surface-level reskinning of the conventional Gregorian calendar (“CGC”) (ie, the ordinary one you’re probably used to) to prioritize different objectives. The main calendar and its veneer can and should be used side by side, giving the best of both worlds at the cost of complexity.
(An example within the CGC: You can interpret the cyclic 7-day week as a simple veneer calendar on the core structure of the twelve months of various lengths. This is so familiar that it’s hard to see. The incommensurate nature of the week and the month/year means there’s no trivial conversion from one to the other, so you need both pieces of information. That is, knowing it’s February 19th doesn’t tell you it’s Monday without further details — or vice versa. These two independent systems are easy enough to work with in daily life thanks to tooling like our ordinary calendars, and the same is true for other veneer calendars.)
It is in the nature of calendars to be compromises. We dream of mathematical regularity, but the rotation of the Earth, its revolution around the Sun, and the phases of the Moon are all messy physical processes without whole-numbered units. The true procession of time is an arrow flying towards the future, but cyclic days, weeks, months, years are a useful convenience.
The CGC makes the compromise that everything should be approximately correct all the time. The months have lengths with no rhyme or reason, but they cover the year in vague imitation of the lunar cycle. Weeks never stop rolling, but the tradeoff is that they don’t align with either months or the year. (ie, weeks are usually divided across month boundaries, and you can’t even pick a year’s calendar without knowing which day of the week it starts on.) Also the 7-day week is fine, but there are other numbers, you know…
In contrast, the ZVC calendar follows the rule that it’s better to have a single clear exception to perfect order than to be consistently messy.
360 is a useful number with tonnes of divisors, and we are fortunate enough to have about that many days in a year. The ZVC calendar takes those 360 days as the main body of the year, with the other five or six as a principled deviation from that norm.
You can and should use other divisions as necessary, but the canonical structure of a ZVC year is: twelve 30-day months each made of six 5-day cycles — “5Cs”. Plus a bonus 5C not part of any month at the end of the year; and when the leap day appears, it is not a part of any 5C or month.
The ZVC year starts with day №1 on March 1st. Every CGC day is numbered from there, without variation between years. So, for example, November 13th is ZVC day №258, which shows it is day 18 of month 9 (because 258 = (9-1)×30 + 18) (also placing it as 5c4.3 in that month — day 3 of the 4th 5-cycle — but use whatever notation you need). The “epagomenal” 5C (ie days №361–365) are February 24th through 28th — of the next CGC year. Starting the year here trades the cost of 59 or 60 days being “offside” between the start of the two calendars… for the benefit of every day of the year having a constant day number, despite leap days.
Everything in ZVC is 1-indexed… with one partial exception. When it occurs, the leap day February 29th is treated as ZVC day №0. This allows the same calculation to work for ZVC leap years as ordinary CGC. At a glance you can see that 2024 is a leap year, instead of needing to offset the divisibility tests by one. This is all about maintaining convenient interoperation with the CGC.
An additional benefit of starting the year in March is that the ZVC months align more or less with the Latinate number-named months, unlike CGC. That is, September, October, November, and December are month numbers seven, eight, nine, and ten, respectively.
The ZVC does not have any canonical fantastical names for its months or days of the 5-day cycle. Feel free to make your own, or use whatever shorthand notation fits your use case. For example, I call the 2nd day of the 5-day cycle “5.2” (Nth day of an M-day cycle → “M.N”).
So there you have it, the ZVC calendar. A small number of irregularities deviating from a simple, orderly system is better than having the whole thing be mildly messy all the time.
Various further notes
The font is Matthew Butterick’s Concourse.
The little sun icon indicates Sunday, and the kanji for earth (土) represents Saturday as in Japanese. The latter also acts as a mild pun on my surname.
Annus Proprius? — the “property of the year”. If there’s a better term for “leap-ed-ness” of the year, I don’t know it.
The easiest way to find the day of week and annus proprius for an arbitrary year is in the first line of its Wikipedia page, eg, ”2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday”.
I originally concocted the main idea of ZVC in 2015, but found it infeasible to use instead of an ordinary calendar, so soon dropped it. It’s only now (in January/February 2024) that I have revived it, named it, made the calendar sheet, and, crucially, acceded to the idea of a “veneer calendar” that I find it in any way practical to use.
Secondarily, while the specifics of ZVC (and the explicit notion of a veneer calendar) are my novelty, there is some prior art in the limited design-space of solar calendars.
- The ancient Egyptian calendar had twelve 30-day months (divided into three 10-day weeks) plus a 5-day epagomenal period. The calendrier révolutionnaire français was similar.
- The Mayan Haabʼ calendar was made of eighteen 20-day months, plus five nameless “unlucky days”, when ”[…] portals between the mortal realm and the Underworld dissolved. No boundaries prevented the ill-intending deities from causing disasters.” I feel similarly about such deviations from a perfect system.
- Some pre-Julian Roman calendars started in Martius (March), possibly allowing the numbered months to make sense (ie, October as the 8th month).
- The Discordian calendar is made of seventy-three 5-day weeks, with a bonus not-part-of-the-week leap day taken at the same time as CGC — so it can be seen as a veneer calendar under my meaning. In fact, this is almost ZVC, but it starts on January first (and has other amusements on top, like the five 73-day seasons). So iff the ZVC calendar is almost but not quite right for you, consider Discordianism!? (Maybe I should concoct some deeper mythos to really sell the ZVC…)
You’re in too deep and want a “hot take”? Fine: I resent the existence of the Doomsday Algorithm. In a just world, it should either be trivial to map dates to days-of-the-week, as in the construction of ZVC — or utterly impossible. (What would the latter look like? I don’t know!) And for another thing, “the doomsday algorithm” is too… “Object Class: Keter” a name to use on something like this!
Who’s “Zorunios”? You may have noticed that I cannot personally follow the same convention as Pope Gregory XIII and use my own name for this — and I wouldn’t want to, considering I’ve probably got more than one novel calendar design in me. So, knowing that I wanted this to be called the “[Something] Veneer Calendar”, and seeing that “ZVC” was an unused acronym, I cast my mind out for relevant words starting with Z. I promptly hit upon the (fictional) sun god Zorunios of my own prior invention, and that fit unexpectedly perfectly. Zorunios, in the lore, is a god of order, agency, and the sun, who was once a mortal king prior to usurping the Primæval Sun — an inchoate eldritch deity from before time — and bringing light to all mankind. … Not that the ZVC wants to supplant anything!!
(Should it thus instead be “Zorunion”, for the adjective version, like “Gregorian”? I consider both acceptable; just use the acronym!)