When it comes to productivity, people are turning in droves to online and smartphone applications. These online tools are helping to keep calendars and to-do lists in the palm of our hand everywhere we go, but they may not provide the greatest benefit to your business or other organization. Thoughtfully designed calendars produced through a professional printing service can be much more functional and yield greater results, as you have more control over them.

You need to create your custom calendars in a way that promotes increased productivity for your specific organization. During the inception and design phases, there are things you need to take into account if you want to effectively print calendars for increased productivity.

Who is the Calendar for?

You first need to take into account who will be using your calendar.  If you are handing out a calendar to current or potential customers, or even selling them for profit, you may want to keep your calendar generic. However, you are most likely going to be disseminating your calendar to your employees for use on the job, so you will want to make all the elements of your calendar as specific to your organization as possible.

What are your Goals?

Assuming that your calendar is indeed for the benefit of your employees’ productivity, you need to consider your organizations goals. Think daily, weekly, monthly, annually, and beyond. If you are going to print calendars for increased productivity, you need to incorporate these goals.

Lifehacker recommends Jerry Seinfeld’s productivity trick of putting and “X” on the calendar for every day you complete a task. If you want your staff to do something every day, week, or month, the calendar should provide small boxes for your team to check these off. If there are multiple tasks they should be carrying out, there should be multiple boxes, and you should consider having them colour-coded for clarity.

List Holidays and Company Events

If you can save your employees time, you are helping them to be more productive. As you design your calendar, you should have any federal holidays, major religious holidays, and any already-known company events pre-printed on the appropriate dates. Not only will your team not need to waste time filling these details in, but you are also diminishing the chance that someone may forget one of these important dates.

Include to-do Lists

You should have a to-do list or other checklist along for each month, especially if your team has certain tasks that you expect from them in different months. For instance, the January checklist could have a pre-printed reminder to hand in all receipts from the previous calendar year for reimbursement.

Use Professional Graphic Design Work

If you want your calendar to help boost productivity, it needs to be as clear and well designed as possible. If your staff is spending time deciphering it, these calendars will be doing the opposite of what you had intended. A printing service template works wonderfully for other sorts of calendars, but with the kind of information you need to amplify productivity, a custom design may be in order. A good graphic designer may be the most important step when it comes to printing calendars for increased productivity.

Citations:

• federal holidays

Julie Wald is a writer, blogger, and the owner of Impressa Solutions. I am also a dedicated cat mom and future health and fitness fanatic.