Blank 8.5" x 4.5" Traveler's Journal Calendar

Smartphones take away time. Sure, they save tons of time, can be quite efficient, and have loads of utility. But I didn’t like how I was sucked into its usage. Social media was the tipping point. I found myself wasting away time and more time. Besides all the hoopla going on with big tech companies nowadays, and my general aversion to them given my time with Linux and working in the technology sector for a couple years, I wanted to get a foot out the door of all the modernization.

It began with wearing a watch regularly. Then, I switched over to using a traveler’s journal for my note-taking. As part of my war on smartphone usage reduction, I thought this would be a good first step. As I thought about how I could get further, I realized the things I used my phone for regularly besides communication was for my calendar and tasks. I knew that had to be the next thing to go.

This led me to want to add a calendar to my traveler’s journal, but I didn’t want to pay for them from Amazon. I found one that was mostly good, but my printer wouldn’t print it properly. Every print was misaligned. I thus decided to download the file and modified it through GIMP so that the file was symmetrically spaced. The file is designed to be printed on a US 8.5" x 11" sheet of paper. You can use a paper cutter to even the page out; I wouldn’t cut more than five to eight pages at once to maintain clean lines.

I printed them again, but still found the prints to be off! If you try to print these double-sided, you may find that both halves don’t line up perfectly. I found the issue was my printer. The fix was to print a calendar as a single-sided sheet, take the sheet, flip it over, and print the second side manually. The calendar lined up much better after that!

My wife was kind to assemble several printed sheets and sew them together.

If I had to make one adjustment, I would add an extra day on the bottom row for those months, of which there are none in 2019, that happen to have an extra Sunday and Monday.

I’ve uploaded this for anyone’s use. I’ve provided the file in various formats.

• PNG
• ODG
• XCF
• PDF