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What if you could see your entire year in one document, physical or digital, solo or collaborative, so that you never felt overwhelmed or overscheduled again?
Learn to build and use a linear calendar to visualize your entire year, manage energy, and avoid burnout with Nick Milo's proven system.
Key Takeaways
- Seeing the whole year at once provides better context and flow understanding.
- Managing clusters and chains of commitments helps avoid burnout and overload.
- Tracking both deadlines and ongoing efforts gives a realistic view of bandwidth.
- Color coding and visual cues make it easier to identify imbalances and priorities.
- Using a linear calendar can transform personal and team planning and reflection.
Summary
- Nick Milo introduces the linear calendar, a system to see your entire year on one page, physical or digital.
- Traditional calendars limit visibility to days or weeks, while the linear calendar reveals bigger patterns and flow.
- The calendar displays months as rows and days as boxes, allowing marking of single days or ranges for events and commitments.
- Using a linear calendar helps gain context, manage energy better, and keep a record of actual experiences.
- Nick shares how to add life events, obligations, and ongoing efforts without deadlines to the calendar.
- Color coding categories and spotting clusters or chains of commitments help prevent burnout.
- The system encourages scheduling recovery time and recognizing anti-patterns in your yearly flow.
- Nick offers a related reflection session called You and Review for annual review and planning.
- Options include physical, digital, or a specialized app version of the linear calendar.
- The video concludes with encouragement to integrate this system with idea management tools like Obsidian.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction to the Linear Calendar Concept
- 00:46Limitations of Traditional Calendars
- 01:36How to Use the Linear Calendar
- 02:09Benefits of Seeing Your Whole Year
- 03:55Adding Life Events and Obligations
- 04:45Including Ongoing Efforts and Mental Bandwidth
- 05:36You and Review: Annual Reflection Session
- 06:24Tips to Avoid Burnout: Clusters and Chains
- 08:03Physical vs Digital Calendars and Final Advice
- 09:56Community Innovation and Closing Thoughts
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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This is the linear calendar, a system I've used to map my life [music] for the past 13 years. It gives me clarity, confidence, and a bird's eye view of my priorities and commitments every year.
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Hey, I'm Nick Milo, and in this video, I'll help you set up your own linear calendar for the year. I'll give you my top tips for how to use it, and I'll share three different options for how to
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use it immediately. So, let's jump right in with how the linear calendar works. Most calendars trap you into thinking small. You're looking at a day or maybe a week at a time, and maybe you expand your view to think through a month. In
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one sense, this is a good thing, limiting the visibility so you won't get overwhelmed. But the downside is that you stop being able to see the bigger patterns or the events in your life. You can't see the flow, how things are
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connected. And that's where the linear calendar comes in. And, uh, I think it's kind of revolutionary. So if you take a look at this calendar, this is from 2025. And this is a zoomed-in view of the actual calendar my team and I use to
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plan the year for our business. You can see it's kind of messy and lived in because we actually use [music] this. So this is the physical, but let's look at the digital. You can see that each month is a row on the calendar, and then each
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box is a day of the week. And the number of days starts on the first day of the month, whether that's a Monday, Tuesday, Saturday, what have you. Then the pattern repeats into the next month. So one line, one month. This allows you to
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add items to individual dates for an upcoming event like a sensemaking session here or a birthday or a day off.
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Or you can draw ranges, longer stretches of time that extend across weeks or months like a workshop or a sabbatical.
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This breaks the traditional boundaries that we draw around this like boxed month. I mean, that's great, don't get me wrong, but what are we losing?
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Instead of being trapped in that daily, that weekly, that monthly rhythm, you can get your entire year all on one page with the linear calendar. You can see your life happen. You can identify the frequency and kinds of things that
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happen in the year. Workshops here, travel there, book writing here for me, and it's all documented. It's really rare to see anyone approach time this way. I mean, you can see it in old railway timetables or in Gantt charts, but
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I've never seen anyone really managing it for one's individual life or for a team. And when you can actually see your whole year instead of just glimpsing through it like in a week view, you get three things. Number one, you get
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context. When you can see your entire year at a glance, something shifts in your brain. Instead of just seeing like what you can fit in, you start to see the overall flow for the entire year.
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Number two, you manage energy way better. Instead of accidentally booking three major commitments in the same month and then burning out like I've never done that, you can see the clusters forming and then make better decisions around your bandwidth. This
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has been invaluable for our team. And then third, and probably my favorite, you get a record of your actual experiences. Because I don't know about you, but looking at the monthly calendar doesn't tell me that much in hindsight.
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Zooming out gives me a reminder of the actual emotional journey I've had over a year. And I can pick it up. I can open it on my computer whenever I want a reminder of where I've been. If that
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resonates, then let's set up your own linear calendar. Now, you can use a physical version like this or a digital one, which will work in any digital style canvas app. Now, to get the printable version, check out the video
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description or scan the QR code around here. There's also a special third option. Now, someone watched my linear calendar video from last year, and they actually developed exactly this type of calendar, and I'll share more about it near the end of the video. No matter
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which method you pick, start by adding life events, personal stuff like anniversaries, travel, vacation, birthdays. Don't just mark single days either. You can include ranges for things like extended trips or just busy seasons. For example, it might be a two-
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trip to New York like I just completed or set time aside to learn a new skill.
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Next, add your obligations. These would be things like work commitments, deadlines, projects. So, on the calendar, I'll mark down when workshops are happening, when we're doing sales periods, and when major launches are scheduled. Okay? Then add those sort of
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sneaky efforts. These are things without deadlines, but they are still going to take significant mental bandwidth. These could be some sort of ongoing initiatives that you have. Maybe it's a goal of learning a new skill or a new
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field of knowledge or just general creative projects that require sustained attention even if you don't know the exact outcome. Because if you only track projects with deadlines, then you'll constantly feel like you have more capacity than you actually do. These are
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the basic logistical layers that you should put on your linear calendar. But of course, customize it to include anything like personal milestones or other types of reflections, too. Now, I'll share my top tips that I've learned from using a linear calendar for over a
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decade. But before we do that, I want to point out something important. A linear calendar shows you the shape of your year. But how can you understand what that shape means? And how can you make your next year the best that it can be?
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That's why I created You and Review. It's a one-of-a-kind two-hour reflection session you can take at any time of the year to process your last 12 months that you lived and the next 12 months to come. In addition to the two-hour
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recording, there's a course and downloadable notes to guide your annual review and preview. And for those of you who are already a member of our academy, You and Review is already included. So, if you don't want to rush blindly into
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the next 12 months, consider spending a couple hours honoring the last 12. Check out You and Review in the link below or the QR code right here. First, color code your categories. Make it so you can see different kinds of things
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thematically across the year. I recommend one color for work, another for personal use, maybe one for travel.
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On our team calendar, we use specific colors there. Workshops are yellow. Sabbaticals are gray. Big launches are red. This visual coding helps us spot imbalances at a glance. Second, catch your clusters. If you see multiple commitments that are clustering
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together, watch out. This is your early warning system for burnout. Now, for example, earlier this year, I had a major book writing milestone overlap with a workshop the team and I were running, and those were both time-intensive, they were creative, and
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they required a tremendous amount of energy for me. That's already a candidate for burnout. So, what did I have to do? I actually had to cut another big effort that I wanted to do at the same time, and that preemptively
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avoided overloading my plate. The more you use the linear calendar, the more you'll quickly notice when these clusters start to form and be able to prioritize the one or two things that you really need to. Third, break your
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chains. Instead of looking for vertical clusters stacking up, look for unending horizontal chains of commitments, one after another without breaks. These are more subtle, but they can still be red flags. The reason is we often assume we can just move from one activity
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immediately to the next activity without rest, without pause. But all of us need recovery time between intense periods.
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This is why as a team we schedule week-long sabbaticals after these intense stretches. You can see them in gray on our calendar bec
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place your priorities. Ask yourself, what are your values right now in life? Okay, do you see them on your calendar?
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The linear calendar is brutally honest about where your time and energy is actually going versus where you say you want it to go. If family time is a priority for you, but your calendar is not showing any of it, then is it? If I
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say creative work is my priority, but the year is packed with logistics and travels and meetups, I probably need to make some changes. The linear calendar reveals these anti patterns in your life, and it gives you an opportunity to
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close the gaps and rework your year to honor what really matters to you. And now, how to pick the right type of linear calendar. First, the digital version. We use Miro for our team calendar at linking your thinking, and I
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love it. We open it in almost every weekly meeting that we run. We can easily collaborate. Someone whose name may or may not be Katon on the team. He could look at the calendar and say, "Wait, are we really trying to do all of
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this stuff in November?" And then we can adjust. We can avoid burnout again and keep everyone much happier. Next up, the physical version. Ideally, you can use a print shop to get the full 11 by 17 experience, but 8 and 1 half by 11 in
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works in a pinch. Keep it on your desk, [music] fold it into your notebook, maybe even sleep with it. Something shifts with the physical. There are no distractions to click through, and it makes it easier for more reflections.
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Additionally, it becomes a cool artifact and record that you can physically hold. I still have my old linear calendars from 2012 and 2013. I can unfold it, touch it, [music] and remember stuff, and it's really cool. But the downsides
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are real. You can't collaborate. It can get really messy, and I've actually been discouraged to write on it because it's hard to erase things and that sort of thing. And you definitely can't filter out or turn off parts of the calendar on
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and off. Which leads me to an exciting third option, an app specifically designed for linear calendars. This is in no way sponsored. The app is called Annukal and it was actually designed by a developer named Satoshi who reached
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out to me last time I talked about linear calendars because in the video I basically challenged everyone here to take this concept and run with it and [music] he did and it just makes the process really easy to use. So let's
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take a look at it together. A year is your canvas. Paint the story of your life. Woo fun tagline. As you can see it starts out pre-populated with entries that you can play with. You can move around. You can change the ranges on
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them. You can click anywhere and add an event or range or category. [music] The categories are colorcoded like I recommend. And you can add extra notes that don't appear in the main calendar but appear if you click on that date.
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Under the display options, you can change the way the grid works or have past events fade out so that future ones are more obvious. But my favorite feature here is being able to turn on and off categories in a click, which
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means it's great for tracking personal milestones versus logistics versus anything else since you can just switch between those modes depending on what you're actually focusing on that day.
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It's really amazing this way. And additionally, if you log in using a Google account, you can change the years you're looking at, switch to the fiscal year view, and even have Google calendar sync your calendar into annual. Now, I
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actually don't recommend that because I don't want you to port over all of your microscopic details from your entire calendar. The whole purpose of a linear calendar is to zoom out and manage your life and energy at a higher level. Now,
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annual is still a simple beta version of what it could be one day, but I'm excited about the vision here and giving more people access to this way of thinking. Drop a comment below if you try it out and if you have any feedback
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for Satoshi and let's keep developing this new and needed way to manage our time. So whether you choose the so whether you choose the physical, the digital or the annukal app, I hope your linear calendar starts to transform how
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you see the progress that you're making through your life. And I hope it helps you make space for your priorities instead of just reacting to things as they happen. I've been there. It's not fun. And if it makes sense for you, feel
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free to check out the UN review, the 2-hour deep dive where I'll walk you through an entire review and preview process. Really works well if you've done the linear calendar or it sets you up for success for the next 12 months to
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come. And if you're wondering, what do I do with all of these insights on my calendar? Well, without a system for your thoughts and idea verse, you'll likely lose track of a lot of your most precious learnings from the year. So, if
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you feel called to build a better home for your ideas, watch this video next, where I'll teach you 80% of Obsidian in just 15 minutes, so you can organize not just your time, but your ideas, too.
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Okay, I'll see you there.
Topics:linear calendaryear planningtime managementenergy managementannual reviewNick Miloproductivity systemburnout preventiondigital calendarphysical calendar
