Doing more with less

Create Your Own Easy-to-Use Year Planner in 15 Minutes Using FreeForm

Brain-dump your life without buying an app. Step-by-step instructions included

Created by author using ChatGPT

When life gets complicated, I create a giant calendar and dump events, chores, concerns, deadlines etc on to it. I always feel better. It’s therapeutic to transform a guilt-inducing confusion of commitments into a clear plan for the days, weeks, and months ahead.

I once created my year-plan on a whiteboard, but then there were apps. Apps don’t feel as therapeutic as a whiteboard, but they are more portable. Despite this, I yearned for the days of drawing my personal big picture.

Then Apple FreeForm arrived, which combined the portability of an app with the simplicity of drawing on a whiteboard. Better, it offers an infinite canvas with the capability to create, duplicate, align, and group objects at speed. Perfect for creating a calendar quickly.

The icing on the cake is FreeForm’s clipart library. I can decorate my year plan however I please.

In this article, I’ll step through how to create the year plan quickly and, for convenience, launch it using a two line Apple Shortcut. Put the Shortcut in the Dock, and you’re only one tap away…