How to Make a Personal Planner that Rocks

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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.

floral planner on table with pencils, plant, and markers.

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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.

a woman holding an apple pencil and a a digital planner in an iPad, with desktop items nearby.

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:

planner with post-its, pens, and markers open on a black table, showing the weekly to do page.

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.

Money-Saving Tip

For a variety of FREE printable planning pages, be sure to subscribe to the Life as Mom newsletter. You’ll get immediate access to our printables library.

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

list of books read in 2020 written in planner

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.”

woman holding a planner on the edge of a lawn chair.

FAQs

What does a personal planner do? 

A personal planner serves as a place to record your goals and overall vision for life as well as to map out a path to accomplish the things you want. Research shows that written, stated goals are more effective and help people achieve them more quickly.

Which daily planner is the best? 

The best daily planner is the one that you will actually use. Think about your personal habits. Do you like digital or paper? Do you like to write or prefer to type? Try a few different methods to see what will work best for your life in this season.

How do I remember to use my planner?

Once you spend the time to set up a personal planner, it’s important to put it to good use. To make personal planning more of a habit, you can make sure to take it wherever you go, schedule planning time at a regular time each month, week, and day, and store it where you will see it every morning and every night.

student planner next to computer and cup of coffee.

What works for you?

Leave a comment below and let us know what works for you.

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

collage of personal planner views, with text overlay.

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67 Comments

  1. Staples also have cheaper notebook (binders) for a dollar or two. They’re not as strong, but still a relatively good notebook.

    Also look at the time the stores have their sales for the start of the school year. Even if you don’t need it at the time of school starting, you can hold i5 until thel wh3n you want to start the year.. Walmart is also a good place to buy cheaper notebooks, and if you’re care, ful they ,are relatively cheaper.

    Diane

  2. Trying to figure out the best way to have a planner that works for ME, and I found your post! I neeeeeeeedddd to do this. I have so much going on in my life and no pre-made planner that hits on it all, and when it gets close it’s not my style. I’ve been so frustrated!

    I’ve looked into Staples binding services, but quick question for you! If I were to choose to buy a super cute planner cover from Etsy, how would I be able to incorporate it? I’m guessing that I wouldn’t be able to do that online, but do you know if they offer binding in their stores? Any other places that offer this?

    Thanks!

    1. Do you mean, could you take the Etsy cover to Staples and have them bind it into your planner? Yes, you just need to talk to their copy center employees and explain exactly what you want.

  3. How thick does your planner end up being? I’ve started designing my own book of weekly and monthly pages with a few other pages mixed in and I’m afraid it will be too thick to be portable!

  4. Thanks for the info! I just wanted to add that when it comes to laminated pages, I use permanent fine tip markers/pens and when I need to erase something, I use rubbing alcohol. Also, Costco often has great prices on bulk binders. Thanks again!

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  6. Hi Jessica, I love this and bought the OLAM with HS pack yesterday….I have been printing and laminating all day today:) I have a question….in the third picture down on this post, what is along the lefthand side of the left page? I cannot make it out and the current forms are a little different so I am just not quite sure, but would love to know.

  7. That is one of the best “make your own” planner instruction. It made sense, and had very useful ideas. I would love to see how you use it. Thank you for taking the time to write this up. I am former military, but I swear I am so A.D.D, I can’t stay focused. I have been looking for the perfect binder, and decided I would just have to make my own after not find much, well one but it has too much I don’t need. You gave me great ideas… thank you