The Calendar Peddler

I found these magic cube calendars a pretty unique spin on the traditional calendar.
Custom Printed Magic Cube Calendars

I always look forward to getting all the new custom printed calendars at the beginning of every year.  Most popular are the promotional wall calendars but there are planners, desk calendars, daily calendars, pocket calendars and planners, magnet calendars, and a bunch more nichy calandar and planner type things.

I myself like the racy and unique ones, not the same old calendar stuff…

This one rocks too!! I will post some more calandars soon!

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I am going to be looking for more of these to recommend, if you have one please submit a comment.

If you aren’t too worried being able to write directly on your calendar like I am, then an electronic calendar or a perpetual calendar might still be a good idea.

Perpetual calendars are neat little devices, almost desktop toys really, that a part the slides back and forth and lines up the days of the month with the appropriate positions on the calendar.  It’s a little hard to explain without a picture, but they’re pretty interesting to look at.  They seem to come in all manner of shapes and sizes, some of them even looking a little artistic in design.

Electronic calendars are also all different shapes and sizes.  Some are simple and display just the date, some have clocks, and some are even programmable with alarms.  The electronic calendars that are programmable are a little too complicated to me.  If I’m going to let something electronic handle my schedule, I might as well just use my computer at that point.  Electronic calendars get bonus points for portability, though.

I don’t like to rely on them too often, but I’ve seen daily desk calendars put to good use by my associates.  I prefer weekly or even monthly calendars, so I can keep a big-picture view, but if your days can be hectic a daily calendar will be exactly what you’re looking for.  Some daily calendars are a little less useful than other calendars for day planning.  Look for the ones that provide space to actually write on them.  I like Far Side calendars are much as anyone else, but they don’t help me stay organized.

Sometimes you can get even more productive with a product that combines several things in one.  A memo pad, credit card holder, pen holder with a calendar… all quite useful.  These tend to also add a nice touch to the desk top, especially if they’re made of a fine wood or leather.

Just say no to cute kitties on calendars!

Maybe I’m just too morbid or regularly depressed, but having to walk past a rack of calendars stuffed with kitten calendars makes my skin crawl.  Yeah, kittens are cute and adorable and blah blah blah, but how much cuteness do we need?  Below the kittens are puppies, and above the puppies are babies, and then over there is the landscape calendar.

I’m looking at you Borders… you won’t trick me into buying these things!  Oh look, a promotional products company combined the best of both worlds, promotional kitten AND puppy calendars. These things have got to sell a ton, because they never stop coming.  They also take no effort to make… they’re like the McDonald’s of calendars.  Get a kitten.  Take a decent picture.  Put picture above calendar.  Send order to printers in china.  Enjoy profits and buy a cruise liner powered by kittens.

Even worse are the calendars filled with cheesecake or beefcake… but that’s a different rant, I suppose!

What is the alternative out there?  How about some emotionally moving pictures with some real impact.  Kittens are a dime-a-dozen, but wars and science have driven society to new heights and depths and aren’t quite as common.  Even before the days of photography, we’ve have visual records of incredible historical events.  Pick some famous figures like Napoleon or Alexander the Great and run with it.   There’s most certainly at least twelve painting done of Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and so on.  Or do a Caesar All-Star Team Calendar, documenting the greatest Caesars of all time and making a calendar of nothing but pictures of Caesar statues.

 Historical art also comes with the great royalty-free experience you don’t get with other subject matters since the works of art have been in public domain and reproduced ad nauseum for centuries.  This could turn out even easier than making a kitten look cute in a photograph, because there’s no need to pay a photographer.  Or maybe you do… I guess?  Someone needs to go to the museum and snap some decent shots, I suppose.  These things are already so cheap you can’t possibly be expecting much when you buy them, anyway!

I’m not looking for a “Hitler’s Greatest Hits” or “Hiroshima Medical Journal” compilation of horrific images to brighten my day when I take a glance at the calendar, but a little more work and a little less formula doesn’t seem like too much to ask.

I guess after reading my first blog this seems like a pretty strange thing to care enough about to make a blog. Do I really think a calendar matters that much?

I really do. I like to keep things in my life organized and making sure that my time is ordered and used efficiently is just as important as keeping my desk clean. Something as simple as a promotional desk calendar sitting on my desk has kept me on track for business and personal goals, this in turn has kept me ahead of my competition.

I see a lot of people around me that try to keep everything important sorted out in their heads and it just doesn’t seem to work out for them. I wouldn’t be where I’ve gotten without something as simple as a calendar; it has kept me on tasks and reminded me of my long term and short term goals.

Structure and schedules make the world go ‘round, and if you’re trying to run a business or manage an office this is especially true.

Desk calendars have proven to be incredibly useful in my daily life, and they’ll be just as useful to you.  The convenience of being able to simply glance at something sitting on my desk and quickly figure out what tasks I’ve got coming up is unbeatable.  Even computer software doesn’t really stand up to a nice physical paper calendar that I can thumb through.

“Desk calendar” is a little vague, so I specifically prefer the kind made out of paper that you can scribble something on.  There are electronic desk calendars but they’re usually just for displaying the date and day of the week.  I like to be able to quickly figure out the date, but that seems kind of limiting to me.