How to Make a Personal Planner that Rocks

Want to put a little order in your life? Consider making a personal planner to suit your life and needs in this season you’re living. You’ll save time and money as well as reach your goals sooner.

Once you’ve set up your own planner, consider setting up a Student Planner to Help Your Child Build Good Habits.

A personal planner may not look like much. It’s just paper, right? Or if it’s digital, it’s just some charts.

But, trust me when I say a personal planner is a powerhouse just waiting to be unleashed. It can hold all your goals, hopes, and dreams inside its pages. 

Without a personal planner, there’s no way I could have written four cookbooks, raised six children, and managed to run a home business.

I’d have gone crazy trying — if it hadn’t been for a tracking system, a personal planner that truly worked for me.

I’ve mentioned before that my personal planner is my brain on paper. I take it with me everywhere and always have what I need to keep track of household, family, and personal responsibilities.

My planner has evolved with me over the years. At one point it housed several calendars, a contacts section, several to-do lists for different areas of life, and several pocket pages to hold extra information or greeting cards that I wanted to keep on hand.

Then as digital took over my contacts and calendars, my personal planner slimmed down, simplified, and yet, continued to be a powerful work horse to help me get things done.

Now, I’ve even moved my planner to a PDF annotation app so that I have it wherever I go, no paper required.

Whatever style of personal planner you choose, it can be a game changer to helping you set goals and make them happen.

Why Do This

A personal planner can save you time. If you know where you need to be and what needs doing over the next weeks and months, you can plan ahead and make sure you aren’t a day late.

It can save you money. If you’re meeting appointments and deadlines as well as planning ahead for events, you’ll never be late or have to pay extra at the bakery because you forgot the school bake sale was today.

It can help you reach your goals. If you don’t know where you want to go long term, you won’t be able to take the small steps now that are needed to get there. A personal planner can help you map out those things.

Tips for Success

How can YOU make a personal planner that works for you? One that rocks your world in all the good ways? Follow these tips for success in making your own planner:

1. Determine what YOUR needs are.

What are the things that YOU need to keep track of on a day-to-day basis? Jot down a quick list so that you have a blueprint for putting together your planner. Some basic things to consider include:

• calendars
• contacts list
• to-do lists
• weekly schedules
• meal plans
• goal setting worksheets
• time budget or ideal week

2. Find planning pages that suit your style.

There are loads of printable, printed, and digital planners out there. I could never find one that I loved, so I ended up designing my own. 

Since 2015, I use the planning pages in The Print & Go Planner that you print yourself. It’s got a clean black-and-white look that you can customize with your own colored pens, stickers, sticky tabs, and Post-it notes. 

Or you can load the PDF into a digital annotation app like Good Notes and embellish it with digital stickers and markets.

3. Decide how you will hold it all together.

Your planner can be paper or digital or a combination of the two.

In the early years, I cobbled all my planning pages together into 3-ring binders, but I found that after a few weeks, my personal planner fell out of use. Then I discovered a trick!

You can have an office store bind your pages with a coil binding. Voila! A SPIRAL-BOUND, personal planner.

That was a huge game-changer. I realized that the spiral-bound format made it super-portable and easy to use. I could fold it back on itself to save space on the counter and to make writing more comfortable. 

You can upload a digital file to Staples and they do a beautiful job printing and binding personal planners each year. Order it on 28-pound paper so that ink doesn’t leak through and let them do the printing so that all the pages go in the right direction.

If you choose to print the pages yourself, it’s definitely going to cost less money. You can even insert laminated pages or dividers to make your personal planner ultra-customized.

Want to try the printed version of our planner, you can order it shipped to your home. 

4. Embellish with colored tabs, stickers, and Post-it notes.

Printing your personal planner in black and white is significantly cheaper than printing in color, whether you print at home or have the copy shop do it. 

Additionally, black and white is so much more versatile! You can easily add color with tabs, stickers, markers, and Post-it notes and change those colors in a heartbeat, based on your mood or the season.

Your personal planner can be as sassy and decorated or as sleek and streamlined as you like it!

5. Use it.

What truly makes a personal planner “rock” is its usability. If you’re not using it every day, it’s not awesome.

For me, one of the stumbling blocks was to switch to a spiral binding and later to PDF annotation. The second has been to make my planner a regular part of my month, my week, and each morning and evening.

Here’s how I use it:

• At the start of each month, I fill out my Month at a Glance sheet with goals for the month. 
• Each weekend I create a new time budget and meal plan for the coming week. 
• I write out my weekly goals as well. 
• Each evening I fill out the top left square with my to-do’s for the next day. 
• I consult my schedule, meal plan, and to-do’s each morning over coffee and throughout the day.

Using my planner regularly helps me get stuff done — and helps me feel like my head is on straight. 

Find out how to make your planner serve YOU and you’ll have a personal planner that rocks.

If you haven’t already done so, check out the Print & Go Planner and see if a personal planner can help YOU organize your “life as mom.”

FAQs

This post was originally published on August 17, 2011. It has been updated for content and clarity.