Plain text calendar template

21 May, 2026

I have been enjoying my CAL.md, a plaintext calendar for a couple months. I have only used it for personal reminders as the family calendar, single-source-of-truth is a traditional wall-hung month view calendar; no chance of changing that!

I still like my own plaintext file to keep track of a few things, especially finance, birthdays, and such. I tried the very basic one line per day approach per the ‘calender.txt’ format, but I like a bit more visual distinction. Below I’ll briefly describe the format, how I check it in Obsidian, and how I currently use it.

The format is best seen in the example snippet below. If you want the full description, see the footnote¹.

# 2026

...

## PRESENT

·······························
**2026-05-11 May  w20**
- 2026-05-11 May  w20 *Mon*
	  - Example event, task or reminder
- 2026-05-12 May  w20 *Tue*
- 2026-05-13 May  w20 *Wed*
- 2026-05-14 May  w20 *Thu*
- 2026-05-15 May  w20 *Fri*
	- Example repeated event (r) with +tag
    – – – – – – – – – –
- 2026-05-16 May  w20 *Sat*
- 2026-05-17 May  w20 *Sun*

·······························
**2026-05-18 May  w21**
- 2026-05-18 May  w21 *Mon*
- 2026-05-19 May  w21 *Tue*
- 2026-05-20 May  w21 *Wed*
	- Meal plan (r)
- 2026-05-21 May  w21 *Thu*
- 2026-05-22 May  w21 *Fri*
    – – – – – – – – – –
- 2026-05-23 May  w21 *Sat*
- 2026-05-24 May  w21 *Sun*

## FUTURE

...

It’s super easy to simply move the ‘Present’ and ‘Future’ headers each week. This means on my side pane Obsidian dashboard I can just have a previewed link to this file at the ‘Present’ section to give the isolated next two week period.

Up to now, it’s only been reminders and events. However I am trialling using this for todos as well. Same format and everything: it’s normally obvious to me if something is an event vs task.

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A bit more explanation on the format:
- I have a header called ‘Present’ for the current week and the next week.
- Each day is a pre-listed bullet under a week line.
- Days have both a searchable ISO format plus one that is easy to scan visually with a combination of week number, Month and day of the week.
- Events, tasks or reminders are sub-bullets under the relevant day (or week line if I want): this enables folding.
- I use bold text to start a week, italics for day of the week.
- Symbols provide visual separation between weeks and between week days and the weekend. It’s super easy to develop this template in Excel using the formula: =CONCATENATE("**",TEXT(A1, "yyyy-mm-dd MMM")," w",B1,"**") Where A1 is just a date, and B1 is the week number (you could combine all in one but I wanted to play around).
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