The most effective way to use a daily planner starts with choosing the right one. Take the Erin Condren planner quiz to discover which planner is right for you. After you've chosen your perfect planner, an easy way to start building good habits is by using your planner every day. Here are a few tips to get you started.
Organizing your daily planner should start with building good habits for staying on track with your life goals and everyday planning. If you're new to maintaining a planner, start small by setting daily goals and checklists. It's the little things that count here! Follow these other tips for organizing your planner:
You can visit one of our store locations in Austin, TX or Irvine, CA to get a hands-on experience in personalizing planners, notebooks, and more! We even offer virtual and in-store workshop events to help you stay organized and increase productivity. Discover the latest events and products at an Erin Condren store near you!
Daily planners are for detail-oriented people. With a full page for each day of the week from Monday to Sunday, you have space to write an exhaustive to-do list each day, daily goals, work appointments, deadlines, social engagements, and whatever else fills your time.
If you are passionate about getting into details and love noting down your plans by hand, then a Moleskine daily planner is for you. There is enough space each day to breakdown lists and tasks so you can plan and organize each moment with clarity and focus. There is room to include all the intricate details that simply wouldn't fit in a weekly planner, such as meal planning, daily budgeting, and random notes. You can use your daily diaryto block time each day to make sure you get to each and every task, including finding some time for yourself and your hobbies. It is also the perfect tool for tracking the healthy habits and routines that you want to establish and maintain.
A Moleskine daily planner begins with a personal data page. Filling out some or all of this page is your first step to making this planner your own. Personalize by adding your name, contact details, and any other key information that you want to keep close at hand in your trusty appointment book.
A 12-month planner measuring 7 x 9". Features a day-per-page format, hourly lines from 6am to 9pm, a double-sided pocket page, colorful mylar Monthly tabs, a sticker sheet, gold wire-o binding and protective gold corners.
Got endless planner in beige. Regalia paper is a joy to write on. After watching a few reviews about recent issues with regalia paper (a bad batch) I was sceptic about the quality, but the planner I got was bang on target with the quality. No bleed through, no feathering and ghosting is minimal. Would definitely buy more endless products in future.
Yes! Full Focus Planner users regularly tell us that using the planner eliminates busywork, and helps them prioritize their tasks so they get more of their important work done than ever before. Ankle-biter tasks that used to waste their time and take up brainspace are eliminated.
You can use as much or as little of the Full Focus Planner as you want. In our FREE Full Focus Planner Community, there are threads of people who customize the planner to fit their specific careers and circumstances.
Redesigned in a smaller size for self-care on-the-go, our Self-Care Rituals + Daily Planner is now filled with six months (200 daily entries) of undated, daily pages to plan, reflect and practice gratitude.
The Review plugin is made to help you assign notes or blocks to daily notes. As the developer of Review, I started wondering how these two plugins could be built to play nicely together. Then I realized that, of course, I am a brilliant software engineer and have already allowed for this possibility.(Actual explanation: luckily the two plugins were already aligned by accident.)
The Daily Planner contains 184 planning pages. Because the pages are undated, it can be used either daily or irregularly.
If used daily, the Planner will last 6 consecutive months. If not used daily, the Planner will last a total of 184 days.
And in 2015-16, I set out to find a paper planner that worked for my busy life. I tried all of the popular brands. But the ONE planner that stuck for me, and I have used every year for the past 6 years, is the Simplified Daily Planner from Emily Ley.
Each daily planner comes with a sticker sheet with colorful flags and fun stickers in a slim front pocket. You could add a mini notebook, a few more sticker pages and some receipts to the pocket, but not much more.
By the way, one thing I learned when I previously used another planner is that you should only prioritize your top three to dos each day. Something about 3 is doable and something you can accomplish in one day.
Etsy is chock full of extra accessories in addition to the accessories already offered by Emily Ley. I keep my planner very basic, but I will show you a fabulous hack that I made at the end of this post.
And, I frequently look at other planners to see if they are better, but they are all just so overwhelming. The last thing I need in my life is more overwhelm. I need something that will work for my schedule and be as simple as possible.
One more thing. I know that these planners are not cheap. I get it. You can run down to the store and pick up something for so much less than what you will pay for an Emily Ley planner. I hope that this review helps you find the right planner for you!
For advice on what to look for in a planner and insight into why paper planners are so popular in this digital age, we spoke to Shu Yao, co-founder of JetPens; Erin Condren, creator of the hugely popular Erin Condren LifePlanner; Sarah McNally, owner of McNally Jackson Books and Goods for the Study; and Kristin Damian, who runs the planner-sticker company Krissyanne Designs.
The leather, which looks pristine when new, quickly becomes worn with visible scuffs and scratches. (We think this just adds to the character of the planner.) One of our 10 staff testers thought the regular size was too big for the portability he wanted, but using the passport size, and keeping fewer notebooks inside, would address those concerns.
We tested the classic spiral-bound planner, which you can customize with a wide range of removable, interchangeable laminated covers. The planner is sold through the Erin Condren site but also at Staples if you just want to pick one up in a store. The high-quality coil binding allows the pages to move smoothly, so when the planner is open, it sits flat on a desk.
Senior staff writer Jackie Reeve has been using Erin Condren planners off and on since 2015, and she still enjoys their durability, layout, and range of available third-party accessories. She found the LifePlanner to be an ideal planner for PTA meetings. Her one function-related complaint is that in 2019 the company changed the layout of its pages slightly, so the perfectly sized stickers she had stockpiled from various Etsy sellers no longer fit.
Paper planners encompass a broad range of options, from minimal, undated books with little formatting to neatly partitioned pages that give you space to flesh out your day, week, and year in detail. Some of the planners we looked at had no adornments or decorations inside, while others had pretty themes and swirly fonts with cheerful, motivational messages throughout. We looked at the whole spectrum and decided to make several picks in different categories.
We researched dozens of brands to narrow down our testing picks, and we asked Wirecutter staffers what they would want to pay for a new planner. You can generally expect to pay less than $50 for a good planner, with a few exceptions. A planner should fit your specific needs, and you may discover that a simple, inexpensive planner you find at a big-box store works better for you than our picks.
Plenty of space for writing: We wanted planners that had enough room for us to jot down tasks, appointments, and notes. We looked for tall, well-spaced lines or boxes wide enough to fit two or three words in a row.
Customization: We looked for planners that offered different covers, in various colors and designs. For ring-bound planners, we wanted a standard paper size so that we could swap in any inserts from any compatible brand.
A variety of sizes: We looked for brands that offered both smaller, portable sizes and larger desk sizes. Especially for refillable planners, which are often a more expensive initial purchase, we liked size options that were standardized across a few brands of planners and inserts (such as the A5 size, which fits 5.83-by-8.27-inch paper).
Availability: We decided to focus on brands that were readily available online and preferably in at least some physical stores. Our interviewed experts gave us some great suggestions for smaller planner companies, but many of those could be difficult to source and were too niche for this guide.
In our original testing in 2017, we had nine Wirecutter staffers help us test 19 different planners to make our original picks, then in 2018 we tested a new batch of 10 planners. In 2020, we tested eight academic-year planners. In 2023, we tested six additional planners against our existing picks, including weeklies, ring-bound options, and multitasking journals.
The At-A-Glance weekly appointment book is a classic business planner available at office supply stores, but it was a bit too big, too businesslike, and too narrow for us to write in the hourly format.
We passed on a range of memory-keeping planners. The Happiness Planner, Purposeful Planners (with some faith-based sections), Get to Work Book, and Simplified Planner offerings are all coil-bound and about the same size as the Erin Condren LifePlanner but have goal-tracking features like the Panda Planner Classic. All of these companies are smaller, so we were worried about stock.
This is important for your personal and professional life. While many people think of productivity as it relates to their job, you also want to be productive at home. This might include getting cleaning and home organization done, or working on projects you keep putting it off. Regardless of what it is, planners help you to stay on track with each individual task you need to complete, and encourages you to move on to the next one effectively and efficiently.
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