How to Make a Personal Planner that Works for You
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Want to put a little order in your life? Consider this diy planner: 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 when you have a personalized planner to track it all in one place.
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A DIY 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 and help you accomplish things you didn’t know you were capable of.
I say this without exaggeration.
Without a personalized planner, there’s no way I could have written four cookbooks, raised six children, homeschooled said children from birth through high school, and managed to run a home business — all on an very tight budget.
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 goal planner is my brain on paper. It’s how I organize my days for success. I take it with me everywhere and always have what I need to keep track of household, family, and personal responsibilities.
This DIY 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 personalized 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 goal planner to a PDF annotation app so that I have it wherever I go, no paper required. Digital planning is the way for me in this season.
Whatever style of personal planner you choose, it can be a game changer to helping you set goals and make them happen.
Why Use a Planner
There are some people who are decidedly not planner people, but there are others of us who thrive on writing things down, keeping a notebook, and get absolutely giddy over free printables and personalized planner pages.
Here’s why:
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’s a valuable tool for future thinking.
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’s great for tracking expenses, bills, and smart financial goals.
It can help you reach those 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 a DIY 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 in a personalized planner include:
- calendars – yearly, monthly, and weekly
- contacts list – You may or may not need this depending on how you use your phone
- to-do lists – I recommend the post-it note to-do list
- 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’ve got several free printables available to newsletter subscribers if you want to check those out. You can also create your own planning pages in Canva or on your computer.
Since 2015, I’ve used the planning pages in The Print & Go Planner. 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 free 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. I didn’t know how much I dislike writing in a binder.
I love spiral bound books, though, and I discovered a trick! You can have an office store bind your pages with a coil binding. Voila! A SPIRAL-BOUND, personalized 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.
Because I have hundreds of people using the Print & Go Planner, I’ve learned how much printing costs can vary across the globe. If you 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! Even if you go digital, you can create digital stickers in Canva to add to your personalized planner.
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. A great, quick read on this topic is Mystie Winckler’s How to Use a Planner Without Wasting Time.
For me, one of the stumbling blocks was to switch to a spiral binding and later to digital planning. The second has been to make my planner a regular part of my year, month, my week, and each morning and evening.
Here’s how I use it:
- I spend some dedicated time at the end of each year to create my vision pages and to do a self-assessment.
- 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, pulling from my monthly and yearly pages.
- 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.
- Since I use my planner digitally, it syncs to my phone, tablet, and computer so I can easily check it no matter where I am.
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.” It’s been a game changer for me to organize life in general to save time and money.
Once you’ve set up your own planner, consider setting up a Student Planner to Help Your Child Build Good Habits.
FAQs
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.
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.
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.
More Good Ideas for Planning
What do you think?
I’d be honored if you chimed in the comments section. What do you think?
This post was originally published on August 17, 2011. It has been updated for content and clarity.
I recently created my first daily routine/schedule, and it’s inspired me to get the rest of my homemaking life in order. I’m seriously considering buying this ebook, but I was just wondering if you had anywhere with people’s feedback that I could read? Like reviews, or something of that sort.
I thought I put those on the sales page, but apparently that is just on the sales page in my mind. JessieLeigh wrote a review: http://www.parentingmiracles.net/2011/08/organizing-my-life-as-mom/ I’ll see if I can get that info to you sooner rather than later. Thanks for asking!
LOL “The sales page in my mind”
I’m gleaning from ya, sister! Working on my binder, using sheet protectors, card stock, and paper. I’ve been creating similar forms to yours in Excel. One word for binder-seekers: I pick up very nice quality binders from Goodwill on half price days for about 35 cents during July. It seems that they overflow with them in the summer before school starts. I bought around 10, mostly white, but some colors in there, too. A great way to get some of these supplies on the cheap 😉
When I was thinking about the school year starting, I remembered you talking about making your own planner last year, and I did the same. Designed specifically for my needs, and bound for 2.99 + cover at Office Depot. I like my planner to fit easily in my purse, so I made all the pages half-size – so far I’m loving it! Thanks for the inspiration!
Is the packet able to reduce to 1/2 size or was it tricky? I am wanting one that fits in my purse too.
You can print 2 pages per sheet and that will give you 1/2 size. However the dimensions are a little different than the full-size version, so the borders aren’t “perfect.” I am working on a 1/2 size version of the calendar pages. Not sure if we will be able to do the entire book in that size.
I can see your point. But, at the same time, the customiz-ability is the key to what makes this work so well.
I never thought about laminating my daily to do list or menu/grocery sheets. So smart! I also like your binding idea. That makes it much easier to throw in your bag compared to my 3 ring binder. Thanks for the great tour of your planner.
I use a binder and love it! I feel like my needs change and I love that I can add to it when needed. My binder stays at home most of the time but I have a planner, that pops out and comes with me where I’m going! It works for me, but your method looks great!
This is going to rock my world! I’m so picky about my planner and it must be spiral bound for me- one of the hazards of being a “leftie”! I just spent way more then I would have like to buy a planner I like- this way is so much better and cheaper! I can’t wait to make my own- unfortunately it will have to wait a year!
I love this!! I just started using a 2 inch trapper keeper with a filing system in it. I will have to let you know how it goes.
I never thought to make my own planner and have it bound. What a great idea!!! That makes so much sense because the actually planners that are out there are never quite customized to what I need.
I have just been starting to use a “paper brain” the last few months, but am finding a three ring binder to be great for my purposes. Maybe once I know exactly what I would want in it, a bound book would be useful. For now, it’s definitely a work in progress!
But I disagree that the binders must be expensive. Since we homeschool, I always check out the section in our local thrift store where they keep the binders and notebooks. For a dollar or less, I buy wonderful, like-new binders, often with a lot of paper still in it. There are often binders with extra pockets and sections, which help me keep good track of the different things in my notebook.
Thanks for the great ideas! I am going to try to implement more of them to help me manage things well in our home.
Definitely agree with you Carlyn! I buy most of all my binders at Goodwill for $1 or $2 and they work just fine 🙂 The season I’m in right now leaves me too unpredictable right now so binding is not a smart choice for me now. With my binder I can re-do as often as needed 😉 (which is pretty often)
Wow – Glad I read this post and comments – Never thought of looking at Goodwill. We are rural, so the closest is about 30 mins away, and I usually only look at clothes.
The NEW Avery binders at Staples start at $8.99! Sounds like the thrift store has some great finds. Great idea!
Where do you bind your “brain”? And what kind of binding is it? I tried to price it out locally and the guy kept trying to convince me into a comb binding which doesn’t lay flat nor is sturdy enough for the size IMHO.
My planner looks much like Jessica’s and I have it bound at Kinko’s. I would guess places like Office Max and Office Depot do this as well. Did the guy just not have the kind of binding you wanted? Would he just do it the way you told him to when push comes to shove?
When I made my first one a year ago several of my friends tried to convince me to try a binder or other methods before I spent the money on a custom book. I did a bit of xeroxing so I ended up spending around $10 including the binding and cover. What I finally got them to see is that I had carefully designed the book based on what I knew about my own habits. It ended up working great. 🙂
You were right to say no to the comb binding. It’s cheap — and easier for the guy to do. It may be that a smaller store doesn’t do spiral? I did FedEx Office, the store formerly known as Kinkos.
Have any of you seen the acr system by Staples? I am just starting to figure out how to make my first planner. I went to staples to have them spiral bind it and found this. The whole system was SO CHEAP!! You can add and remove pages!!! I also scored because a Laminator was on sale!!! Thanks for sharing this learned so much.
http://www.staples.com/sbd/cre/marketing/arc/
Teresa
Cool. Does it have a hole puncher so you can add your own pages?
Yes Jessica, If you look into buying the system that makes the spiral binding yourself, this it is way cheaper but more expensive then a normal 3 hole punch. It was just under $40.00 here in Canada which means will be cheaper in the USA? I was able to make both mine and my daughters binders, and now trying/planning to put together the command central binder, but not sure we need it will one child?? Still thinking it through. But I love the acr because if the week didn’t go as planned just move it over. Plus I do lesson planning one week at a time and need to add that week in EVERY Sunday and I do it on the computer. I was even able to add a pocket folder!!! LOVE the idea, thanks!! I don’t blog so sadly have no way to show you.
http://www.staples.ca/arc/directory_arc_20051_1_20001
Thanks for the tips!