24-Hour Circular Schedule Maker

Click and drag on the wheel to divide your 24 hours

A circular schedule puts the whole day on one clock face and gives every activity a slice as wide as the time it takes. Here, you click an empty spot on the ring and a 1-hour activity starts there. Click and drag, and the slice grows to the length you drag. Select a slice and two handles appear at its ends; dragging a handle moves the start or end in 15-minute steps, and a neighbouring activity that touches it grows or shrinks with it.

Under the wheel, the current-time hand shows what you should be doing now and how long is left, and the list on the side puts activities and gaps in time order. The day totals add up activities that share a name, so you can see at once how many hours go to sleep, study or work. When you are done, save the plan as a single A4 page, PNG or PDF, with the title, the wheel, the list and the totals.

When a circular schedule beats a table

A table is better for exact times. A wheel is better for seeing how the day is divided: the width of a slice is the length of the time, so you can see what fraction of the day goes to sleep and where your free time bunches up. It is most useful for these cases.

• School-holiday routine: set sleep, homework and play time together with your child, print it and stick it on the wall. Picking an icon for each activity helps children who do not read well yet.
• Exam week: fill school and travel first, then place study blocks and breaks in what is left. The totals show how many hours of study you can realistically fit.
• Workday routine: add the commute and work hours, then look for room for exercise or study in the evening.
• Shift work and night shifts: sleep that crosses midnight, or falls in the daytime, is still one slice, so you can compare shift patterns by how much sleep each leaves.
• Weekends and days off: build a separate plan for days off and save it, so your rhythm does not fall apart when the routine does.

How to make one, step by step

1. Pick a starting template. Choose Holiday, Exam time, Workday or Weekend, or start from an empty wheel. Applying a template replaces the current plan, and Undo brings the previous one back.
2. Fix the fixed things first. Drag the handles of sleep, school or work to the real times. If the end is earlier than the start, the activity runs into the next day.
3. Add meals and travel. They are the time most often left out. In the list, press Add on a free-time row and a 1-hour activity starts at the beginning of that gap.
4. Place what you want to do in the time left. Add study, exercise or hobbies and give each a short name. Short names such as “Commute” fit best inside the wheel.
5. Group by colour and icon. Using one colour for one kind of activity makes scattered time easy to find. Icons come from 16 emoji or from a photo you upload.
6. Check the totals, then save. Look at sleep and free time in the day totals, then save a PNG or PDF. A photo or logo placed in the centre also appears in the saved file.

On a touch screen, tapping an empty spot adds a 1-hour activity. Dragging with a finger scrolls the page instead, so use the handles, or the start and end fields, for other lengths.

How big is a time on the wheel? One hour is 15 degrees

Dividing 360 degrees by 24 hours gives 15 degrees per hour and 3.75 degrees per 15 minutes. The width of a slice shows only how long something takes, not how important it is. Midnight is at the top and time runs clockwise, so 6:00 is on the right, 12:00 at the bottom and 18:00 on the left.

Whether text fits in a slice depends on its real size. On a narrow screen the wheel gets smaller and the name of a 1-hour slice may drop out, but the activity is still in the list and in the saved file.

Past midnight, and dragging handles

Sleep from 22:00 to 07:00 is one item: start 22:00, end 07:00. When the end is earlier than the start, the activity runs into the next day, and the edit panel says “Until 07:00 the next day”. An end of 00:00 means the activity finishes at midnight (24:00).

Each selected activity has one handle at its start and one at its end. If a neighbour touches the edge you drag, the shared boundary moves for both, so cutting sleep by 30 minutes lengthens the breakfast next to it by 30 minutes. No activity can get shorter than 15 minutes, and when the next spot is free, an activity only grows up to the start of the next one. With a handle focused, the arrow keys move it 15 minutes and Page Up or Page Down move it an hour, so you can edit without a mouse. For times that are not on a 15-minute step, type them into the start and end fields, which accept any minute.

How to read the day totals

The totals add up the length of every activity with the same name, ignoring capital letters and extra spaces. If you call both blocks “Work”, they merge into one line. If you call them “Morning work” and “Afternoon work”, they stay apart. Percentages are shares of the day’s 1,440 minutes, and the last “Free time” line is time you have not planned yet. This is what the Holiday template gives when you leave it as it is.

If you would rather see meals as one line, rename breakfast, lunch and dinner to “Meals”. The totals then show “Meals 3 h”, while the wheel keeps the three slices where they are.

How your plan compares with an average American day

To see how far a plan is from a typical day, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey is a good yardstick. Its 2025 results (released June 25, 2026) give these averages. The first two rows cover everyone aged 15 and over across all days of the week; the working-day rows cover only full-time employed people who worked that day.

Those averages include people of every age and job, so they are a reference point, not a target. If your plan has far less leisure than 5 hours or more work than 8, check that it is realistic.

Recommended sleep by age

On a circular schedule, sleep is usually the biggest slice. Settling it first makes everything else fit the real day. The table gives the ranges from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (children and teens) and the National Sleep Foundation (adults).

The sleep in the starting templates fits these ranges: 10 hours for Holiday, 8 hours for Exam time, 7 hours 30 minutes for Workday and 8 hours for Weekend. The tool does not judge whether your sleep is enough, so compare the sleep line in the day totals with this table yourself. If you feel unwell or sleep problems persist, talk to a doctor.

Saving and printing as PNG or PDF

The saved file is one A4 portrait page (1240 × 1754 px, 150 dpi). It carries the title and subtitle at the top, a wheel about 16 cm across in the middle, and the time-ordered list and day totals below. Short activities whose names do not fit inside the wheel still appear in the list.

• PNG: handy for sending in a message, for a phone wallpaper or for a class noticeboard.
• PDF: the page size is set to A4, so print at “Actual size (100%)”. The text is part of an image, so you cannot edit it in a PDF editor.
• Editing again: open this page in the same browser and your autosaved schedule is there. Change it and save again; files you already downloaded do not update themselves.

Common mistakes

• Leaving out meals and travel: if you list only study and work, the plan is longer than a day. Gaps in the list are usually these two.
• Two names for one activity: “Study” and “Studying” are counted separately. Type the same name for anything you want added together.
• Entering sleep twice: if an older plan has a late-night block and an early-morning block, adding one long sleep over them overlaps and is refused. Delete one of the two and stretch the other.
• Too many 15-minute slices: small slices leave no room for names. Fold short breaks into the activity before or after.
• A plan with no slack: a day packed to the minute slips as soon as one thing runs late. Leave about 30 minutes free, try the day, then adjust.

Limits

• It does not send reminders at set times. Put anything that needs an alert into your phone’s alarm or calendar as well.
• It makes one day at a time. To keep a weekday and a weekend plan, save one as a file, switch to another template and save that too.
• You can add up to 48 activities, and each time slot holds only one activity.
• Autosave stays in this browser only. Nothing is sent to a server, so it is not shared with other devices, and clearing site data or closing a private window removes it.
• Photos are shrunk in your browser (256 px for the centre, 128 px for an activity icon), so photos full of small text are hard to read.
• It does not judge how much sleep or study is enough; the statistics and ranges above are for comparison.

Reference date The statistics and sleep recommendations were checked on 2026-10-22.

Sources

• 01US Bureau of Labor Statistics: American Time Use Survey 2025 results (June 25, 2026)Sleeping 9.03 hours and leisure and sports 5.16 hours per average day; full-time employed people worked 8.1 hours on days they worked, in table 1 of the release
• 02Hirshkowitz et al., National Sleep Foundation’s sleep time duration recommendations (Sleep Health, 2015)7–9 hours for ages 18–64, 7–8 hours for 65 and over
• 03Paruthi et al., AASM consensus on recommended sleep for children (J Clin Sleep Med, 2016)10–13 hours at 3–5 years including naps, 9–12 hours at 6–12 years, 8–10 hours at 13–18 years
• 04MDN: Window.localStorageBrowser-only autosave, which a private window clears when it closes
• 05MDN: HTMLCanvasElement.toBlob()How the browser creates the PNG and JPEG (picture inside the PDF) files

Frequently asked questions

Tools to use with it