How to Make a Personal Planner that Works for You

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.

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.

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.

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More Good Ideas for Planning

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