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Efficient Annual Planning with a Circular Calendar App

Annual Planning with a Circular Calendar app like PlanIt fosters better collaboration and resource utilization through improved oversight of essential activities and events throughout the year.

A circular calendar, or annual planning wheel, provides the user with a bird’s eye view of the full year and supports continuous improvement and the rollout of strategic objectives within the organization. A dedicated tool for annual planning like PlanIt is also suitable for high-level event and campaign management, as well as basic project management software or providing a consolidated high-level view of ongoing projects.

An annual planning tool like PlanIt for Microsoft Teams, Word, Excel, or PowerPoint is very helpful for planning and visualizing important events, deadlines, and projects throughout the year. Dedicated annual planning tools like PlanIt facilitate quickly building a dynamic plan and allow the organization to connect the events or activities in the calendar to trackable tasks in Microsoft Planner and display them in the Outlook calendar.

With the PlanIt annual wheel app for Teams, annual wheels can be created quicker than in Word and Excel. It offers a better visual appearance while being very easy to use. As mentioned, PlanIt also integrates with Microsoft Planner and Microsoft Outlook, making it an excellent choice for those who want annual wheels in Microsoft Teams and annual wheel activities in Outlook. Explore the PlanIt app here.

Five steps to create an effective annual plan:

  1. Define the purpose of the annual plan. Determine whether the annual wheel should focus on departmental objectives, i.e., HR, marketing, sales, or organizational-wide goals.
  2. Gather the necessary information. Include project deadlines, important meetings, and marketing campaigns in your annual wheel template to ensure all relevant events are included.
  3. Choose an appropriate format. The annual wheel can be designed digitally in Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, or with the PlanIt app for a more dynamic annual wheel, which uses Microsoft Planner for task tracking and Microsoft Outlook for calendar entries.
  4. Design the annual calendar wheel
    • Time division: Start by dividing the wheel into months, and consider structuring the view using Excel or Word. In PlanIt, the time division happens automatically.
    • Color coding: This helps differentiate between different types of activities and projects, which is essential in an annual wheel in Teams. In the PlanIt annual wheel in Teams, you can set the color for entire Planner collections for more effective annual wheel planning.
  5. Prioritize events and activities.

In PlanIt, we recommend that the most important categories (rings) be placed on the outer part of the wheel to utilize the space best for text descriptions of events. We recommend 2 to a maximum of 8-10 categories (rings) in the annual wheel; otherwise, the text becomes quite small, and you need to zoom in a lot. Highlight and prioritize important events to ensure nothing is overlooked, especially in an annual wheel template in Excel, where the potential for details can be many and complex.

Review the annual wheel regularly to ensure it reflects current priorities and makes necessary adjustments. This is critical for an annual wheel in Word, Excel, or PlanIt.

Communicate the plan regularly. Share the annual wheel with relevant stakeholders to keep everyone synchronized. In PlanIt V3, it has become especially easy to share using the PlanIt annual wheel for Teams. Here, you can easily export the annual wheel to PDF, PowerPoint, or Word by exporting to SVG (Vector image file) or PNG (standard image file) or printing to PDF.

By following these steps, you can create an annual wheel that not only effectively organizes your or your organization’s activities throughout the year but also maximizes productivity and helps achieve set goals. Consider whether an annual wheel template in Word or Excel is sufficient or if you want to plan more efficiently with a custom-built annual wheel app for Teams, which handles task management with Microsoft Planner and displays events from the annual wheel in Outlook.