Hourly planner
A sixteen-hour day divided into hours and half hours, seven days across. Built for time blocking rather than list keeping.
Opens with these settings already loaded. Change anything you like, then download as PDF, PNG or SVG.
What time blocking needs from a sheet of paper
Time blocking means assigning work to a specific hour rather than keeping a list and hoping. The method depends on one property a list cannot give you: finite space. A list of twelve things looks achievable. Twelve things drawn onto a sixteen-hour grid, with the meetings already occupying four of those hours, does not, and that visible collision is the entire mechanism. For this to work, the sheet has to show the whole working day at once and it has to have enough room in each row to write a real sentence.
Why thirty minutes is the practical floor
People often ask for a fifteen-minute grid and then stop using it. The reason is physical rather than philosophical. On a Letter sheet with seven day columns, each column comes out around twenty-five millimeters wide. Across a sixteen-hour day you get a little over fifteen millimeters of height per hour, which is a comfortable line of handwriting. Split that into quarters and you have under four millimeters per slot, which is smaller than most people can write in without printing tiny block capitals. Half-hour lines sit right at the edge of usable, which is why they are on here and drawn faint. If you want quarter-hour resolution, drop to a single day and use a narrow ruled sheet with times written in the margin.
A long day costs you row height
This page runs six to ten, sixteen hours, which is generous and deliberately so. It is the range that catches an early start and an evening commitment on the same sheet. The cost is that every row is shorter than it would be on a ten-hour sheet, and if you never write anything before eight or after seven you are paying for empty rows twice over. Narrow the range in the generator and the remaining rows grow to fill the page. Most people who print this a second time print it narrower.
Printing it accurately
This only measures correctly if your printer doesn't rescale the page. In the print dialog set Scale: 100%, not "Fit to page" or "Shrink oversized pages". If you're not sure it worked, print the calibration page, measure the ruler on it with a real ruler, and it will tell you exactly what your printer is doing to the page.