I am not sure where I read it or watched it (in the past 18 months, I have probably watched nearly 100 videos on organisation, productivity and using OneNote), but I think one idea that I find very useful is creating a summarised overview for the full year. This helps me note down in a simple way what the year looks like and it is updated by me as we go through the year. It provides a great way to see what has transpired and what is in play for the rest of the year, as we know it.
Since this is the start of the year, it’s a great time to create one and document how to do so.
What’s a Year Overview?
A Year Overview is a single page that serves as a quick reference page for the year. For this, it must provide us a few important details as quickly as possible. For me, this needs to include:
- A full year calendar, in my case starting the week on a Monday
- A list of public holidays for my main location (in this case Singapore)
- My plans are impacted a bit by the school holidays for the kids, so I want the calendar to show me school vacations
- Key work highlights for the year – this could be key deadlines, events, travel plans, visitors, release dates, dates for renewal of our systems, important anniversaries (e.g., when a system went live for the first time) and so on.
Let’s put this together now. There are only really two parts to the page:
- A full year calendar with all the important information (public holidays and school vacations) incorporated
- A Year Highlights Table which is just a simple table to show key items for the year
A Full Year Calendar
We can get quite far by finding a calendar for our country that has the public holidays highlighted or incorporated. For the past few years, I have used the General Blue website for the past couple of years since it provides many variations of calendars for different countries.
For example, this page has calendars for Singapore for 2025, starting on Monday. You can choose the year and the starting day of the week, or you can back up and select a different country from https://www.generalblue.com/calendar/find-by-country
General Blue allows you to download PDF, DOCX, or XLSX version of the calendar. I normally get the Excel calendar so that I can edit it.
Step 1: Download a calendar file that you like.
The calendar file already has the full year organised in a 3 column, 4 row grid with the public holidays marked in red, and the list of public holidays below the calendar. Choose a look like you like, and download and open it.
Step 2: Editing the Excel Calendar File
Normally, I edit the Excel file to add colour highlights for the school vacations in a subtle, yet clearly visible, manner.
Step 3: Make it an image
Finally, we need an image that we can past into OneNote. You can either screenshot it, or as I do, I prefer to select all the cells in Excel and paste as image into a different tool, e.g., Word so that I have the full image. Then, I can use that image to paste it into OneNote. (Note that when you paste it into OneNote, you can right click on the image and click on Set Picture as Background – once you do that, you will be able to write or enter text on the image should you need to.)
The Year Highlights Table
This is really just a table that lists all the highlights by month. For me, each row has four fields:
- Date/ Date Range: this is just when something happens or will happen, e.g., 08 (for the 8th of that month) or 23 – 25 (for 23rd ~ 25th).
- Icon (optional) or highlighting (optional): this is to help identify items more easily, e.g., a play icon for something starting, a stop icon for something stopping, an airplane icon for outbound/ inbound travel (best if you can find 2 different ones), an office icon for something related to an office branch, a celebration icon for an anniversary, and so on. I sometimes highlight items that are tentative, e.g., a work trip to Malaysia is expected to be on Sep 13 but is pending confirmation – I might highlight that with an orange background to indicate that it is tentative.
- Grouping (optional): a character code that roughly allows me to group items together, e.g., either a customer name/ abbreviation, a project name/ code, company name, department name, etc. to be able to quickly see what it’s related to. I leave this blank when it doesn’t add extra value to provide this.
- Comment/ Detail: this the main description of the item. It includes a short but clear note (can be multi-line, if relevant) about the item. For example, a travel plan could be listed as “Trip to MY (meet ABC, XYZ, MHK)” or you could add an entry like “Managers Meeting” or “Go-live for Project”.
A sample of the highlights table is shown below and you can see the organisation:
- Months are separated by a single row for the month, highlighted in grey as a separator.
- For each month, important dates (without month) are inserted the first column and the other columns follow, as explained earlier. Dates are organised chronologically
- Notice the underline and colour under the “Management Meeting” – that is to indicate a link and it links to specific pages within OneNote where the details of the meetings/ visit are noted. Of course, these are links and could point anywhere.
- In Feb, you can see that I use 2 different icons for travel – the yellow icon is for inbound travel (someone visiting us) and the blue icon is for outbound travel (me travelling).
- Notice also the highlight under Mar 05 – 09: this is to indicate that it is tentative and may not happen.
- You will also see that Mar 05 – 09 show the travel dates but the description shows “Convention: 7, 8” to mean that while the travel is 5th – 9th March, the actual convention is on the 7th and 8th March.
- Sometimes, an entry without a date means the rough date, e.g., at the start of the month, it could just mean that it is expected in that month.
- Finally, notice that the last item in Mar is 30 – 02: this means it starts in March and end on 2nd April.
All of this is about convention that I am using – as you work with it, you will develop your own convention and what works best. My only advice would be to try to stay consistent if you can.
Organising the OneNote Page
Normally, the highlights table is more important for me than the calendar reference. So, I organise the highlights on the left of the page and the calendar on the right. So, this is roughly what it looks like – of course, the data is fake but you get an idea of how I use it.
Productivity around Calendars
If you like the way I organise stuff, you might find these two posts on setting up calendars for time zones and travel interesting and relevant:
- Part 1: Timezones and travel
- Part 2: You’re not using your calendar enough!
If you found this post useful or would like to add more thoughts, feel free to share the post (you can tag me as @onghu on Twitter or on Mastodon as @onghu@ruby.social or @onghu.com on Bluesky to discuss more) or leave a comment below.