Calendar as Time Map

What is a Time Map? It’s a big, year-long calendar.

BIG is important. YEAR-LONG is the point.

Our family has been creating huge calendars for years. We didn’t call them Time Maps until recently but they’ve always been there. In the beginning they were just a few months at a time but they grew alongside our need to envision further horizons. Now that they are a year, I can’t imagine them any other way.

Ian works large scale so we have always had big materials around. We’d usually find a random large piece of paper, a charcoal pencil, and a yardstick, gather the kids and turn it into a joint math project. How wide can the day columns be in order to fit seven on the paper? How tall can we make the weeks? How many days are in February? And then the writing all of those dates. Together we would fill in birthdays and holidays and any big trips or events that we had on the horizon, but along the way as we marked off our days, we would also record little things like a new recipe that we tried or a funny quote that made us all laugh. The big family calendars not only helped the kids learn to plan, but these Time Maps also increased their awareness of the passage of time as well as the people and rituals that our family cares about.

The Time Maps start out clean but they get messy. A 3-year-old’s handwriting? Treasure. Crowded weekend days? Telling. We use pencil but we tend to not erase much because cancelled plans and unmet goals are part of the story.

We keep our Time Maps. They are a diary of our collective days written out in our various scrawls and I treasure them.

Make one. It takes up a lot of space but put it in a high-traffic area of your home. We use ours daily if it’s in the kitchen, almost never if it’s in the hallway or on the back of a door.

I’m doing something new: I have had a small run of beautiful 2027 Time Maps screen printed in Bali. I’ve got them with me in the USA this summer.

If you’d like one, you can find them here.