Horizontal weekly planner

The layout for people who write sentences

A vertical column is about 38mm wide, which holds six to eight handwritten characters per line. A horizontal row on portrait Letter is roughly 165mm of clear writing width, which holds a whole thought. If your entries are "Call the surveyor about the boundary" rather than "Call surveyor", this is the layout that fits them.

The trade is vertical room. Seven rows on portrait Letter gives 36.3mm per day, which is four writing lines after the day header. Combining Saturday and Sunday into one row gives 42.3mm and a fifth line.

Where the four-line limit comes from

It is arithmetic, not a design choice. Usable height on Letter after margins is 254mm. Divided by seven days that is 36.3mm, and after a 7mm day header at 7.5mm per writing line you get four lines.

The six to seven lines per day that commercial planners advertise needs about 48mm per day, or 336mm in total. No single sheet at any of our sizes is that tall. That is the honest reason the two-page spread exists, and it is worth saying plainly rather than implying a single sheet can do something it cannot.

Landscape, if you want longer lines still

The landscape version gives about 230mm of writing width per row on Letter, at the cost of dropping to roughly 26mm of row height. It suits a week of appointments and short notes rather than a week of paragraphs.

Also known as

This layout is searched for under several names, and they all describe the same file: weekly planner landscape pdf, horizontal weekly layout, weekly planner days as rows. One page, one grid.