Career & Business Coaching Blog.
Inspiration and tips for multi-passionate creatives & entrepreneurs.
9 best planners to achieve your goals
As creative, multi-talented, curious, ambitious doers we have many interests and projects to keep track of. Every day is a fresh page in our planner with different work obligations, goals to aim for and a life to take care of. But that’s not all. We also have a mission – to make a difference, change the world… leave our mark. Right!?
Balancing our obligations with our personal interests and aspirations is often the biggest struggle we face. Making sense of the ideas, goals, and to-dos that constantly roll around our heads isn’t easy. Often it’s as if they’re all pulling at us for our attention. When that happens (which is, well, almost every day) it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.
Without a systemized approach to our daily work, scheduled events and projects we might feel in control of our goals but we aren’t. That’s why we need planners!
As a coach for multi-talented, creative women I’m lucky to work with amazing humans who aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty. The problem is, due to their multi-passionate nature, they’re often juggling a lot of balls in the air at the same time. Making sure they stay there, and don’t come crashing down is a fulltime job – and not an easy one at that. Again, it’s a process that requires an organized plan. But also actions and the soulful productivity practices to go along with them. Regardless of how hardworking we are, neglecting to plan how we’ll achieve a goal will lead to disappointments & frustrations.
With the end of the year in sight, what better time to put together a list of my favorite planners to help you get clear on your goals, stay on track and finally achieve your dreams!
Here’s my pick of 9 best planners to achieve your goals.
The Clever Fox Planner made it to #1 on this best planner list again this year. From all the planners I have (and I have many, believe me) this is the one I use on a daily basis. I love the daily undated version. Yes, you can start using it anytime, isn’t that awesome? Even more cool is the space you have to record your weekly objectives, routines and habits.
Some other useful features include:
Comes in pink, black or orange.
Contains pages for gratitude and self-awareness.
Features pages to record your top goals for the year, daily rituals, a mind mind, vision board, and more.
Comes in both weekly and daily versions, with monthly overviews.
Anyone looking for a planner that will also serve as a goal-setting tool and habit tracker will enjoy the Clever Fox Planner. With space to record month to month and week by week objectives, wins, and habits I find it very useful, and a perfect addition to other tools to help me stay on track to accomplish the goals that really matter to me.
#2 Day Designer
As a creative, multi-passionate entrepreneur, the Day Designer is one of my all-time favorite planners. An instinctive planner that’s not only spacious but also extremely beautiful! Designed with the wisdom in mind that a well-structured day leads to a well-lived life, the Day Designer offers an ingenious, yet simple framework to help you find balance, focus, and increase productivity, by focusing on what’s important.
The Day Designer is a blend of worksheets, prompts, planning tools, and note sections. I love how its initial pages offer a variety of worksheets, each intended to enable you to discover your qualities, values, individual abilities, vision, and interests.
Inside the Day Designer you’ll find:
A separate page for each day of the week, with the exception of the weekend, where Saturday and Sunday share a page.
Weekly spreads that start on Monday and run daily from 5 am to 9 pm.
Within the day by day pages you’ll also discover prompts for your top 3 to-dos, inspirational quotes, space for dinner planning, a gratitude section, and more.
The Day Designer comes with a notes section, a monthly calendar, and space for project planning with due dates.
The Day Designer is a perfect planner for anyone looking to define objectives, create plans and take action.
#3 The Planner
This planner, created by Carrie Green from the Female Entrepreneur Association, is another great business planner to keep you inspired, focused & dreaming big.
The Planner is a limited-edition daily planner that covers an entire year of planning, and goal setting. When you’re flipping through the soft pages of this planner, you can’t help but think it was created by someone who knows A LOT about effective goal setting, and has a great sense of style.
The Planner has a luxurious powder pink & gold foiled cover, gold accented corners, and gold wire binding. The first pages of the planner are for yearly planning, and asking yourself powerful questions about what you want to achieve.
I absolutely love the monthly calendar spread, weekly planner pages and daily pages of this planner. On the daily pages you have space to list your 3 top goals of the day, a schedule from 7am until 10pm, and a section for notes. At the bottom of each page is an inspiration quote.
All of this, together with the free online course and monthly bonuses that come with The Planner, make it one of my top picks of the year!
The Daily greatness collection is probably the most in-depth planner collection out there. If you’re looking for a blend of goal-setting workbooks, tools for focus and productivity, to-do lists, and daily or weekly planners, Daily Greatness is for you.
For my business I swear by the Daily Greatness Business Planner – one of the most comprehensive and complete business planners available on the market today. Designed for optimal focus, personal growth and organization, the week-to-a-view pages will guide you in forming excellent thinking habits while taking action on your most important priorities. The weekly check-ins, challenges, planners and inspiration keep you firmly on track, while the 90-Day high-level check-ins and challenges keep you committed, accountable and motivated to achieve your goals. Each stage lays the foundation for staying true to your purpose as an entrepreneur, reaching your goals, expanding your mind and exploding your business.
Daily Greatness also offers other collections worth checking out in case you’re searching for more structure to continue making progress in other areas of your life or business.
#5 Inkwell Press LiveWell Planner
What I love most about the Inkwell Planner are it’s build-in tools to help you deal with overwhelm. Especially useful when you’re a multi-talented, creative woman with a gazillion ideas and interests!
The Inkwell Press Planner comes with proven productivity tools and reflective prompts to help you feel inspired, relaxed and in control while working on your goals. The planner is also fully customizable and comes in different planner formats including daily planning, week after week planning, goal-setting and more. With the new liveWELL 360° disc planning system, pages can be added or removed depending on your needs.
The focus of the Inkwell Planner differs from most other planners in that it’s more than just setting goals and productivity. This planner’s main goal is to help you create a life full of happiness and purpose. It’s about bringing balance, self-care and meaningful creative pursuits into you life. How inspiring, right?
#6 Simplified Planner by Emily Lay
The Simplified Planner is intended to help you put that which matters most first in your life. Whatever it might be, whether starting a creative project, a new exercise routine or a healthy change in eating habits – the Simplified Planner will help you get there. Within the planner you’ll find events and memories sections, space for dinner plans, and more.
I’m especially fond of all the inspirational quotes added throughout the planner.
The Simplified Planner is a perfect option if you’re looking for a lovely, compact, well-organized planner. Oh, and it comes in two versions: luxurious Mohawk and gold wire-o binding. Both so beautiful it’s hard to choose!
The Erin Condren Life Planner is one of my most loved planners. It has everything you could ever want in a planner. Besides keeping track of your daily appointments and to-dos, it helps you define objectives, get a clear vision of exactly what you want, and take charge of your life.
What makes the Erin Condren Life Planner so exceptional is how much of it you can customize. Different planning layouts, color schemes, cover & coil options; you can build your planner the way you want – and need it.
MY PA Planner is a newcomer in my planner selections. As I’ve mentioned above, for my business I’ve sworn by the Daily Greatness Business Planner a few years now. The MY PA Planner might well be its biggest competition!
If you’re looking for a planner that doubles as a personal business assistant, this planner might be exactly what you’re looking for. MY PA is a goal-setting tool as much as it is a daily planner. It comes with an extensive section of reflective questions about your personal and business goals, review prompts, financial overviews, and more. It even tracks your social media and content activities. What I really love about this planner is that it gives more space to write down daily goals, actions, and to-dos than it does for appointments. For someone like me – and keeps track of appointments digitally – having enough space to jot down ideas and to-dos is a must.
My PA Planner key features that I love include:
Yearly Life, Business & Marketing Planner.
Yearly, Monthly and Daily goal Setting Planner.
Social media & content planner.
Weekly Review and Gratitude Journal.
Idea and Inspiration Vault for all your amazing ideas and doodles.
Daily Health & wellness checker where you can track your daily water intake and record exercise.
Space for your notes and reminders.
Space to draw, mind map & be creative.
With all these benefits and features, I’ve decided to give the MY PA planner a spin as my business planner this year. That’s how impressed I am by it!
#3 PowerSheets Intentional Goal Planner
I’m ending this year’s list with my all-time favorite goal planner. Although some of the planners above come with goal planning sections, many of them don’t. And when they do they often don’t go into enough depth or don’t ask the right questions.
Not the PowerSheets. This intentional goal and action planner is a step by step system created to help you define who you want to be in the big picture and how to get there. It brings together a lot of the golden nuggets I’ve seen in other planners: ideas for the new year, prompts to dig deep into who you really are, evaluation tools to get clear on where you are right now, a section for your big picture dreams and even your word of the year.
That’s for the first part of the PowerSheets. The goals section that follows guides you through the process of turning your ideas and big picture dreams into goals and action plans that you can actually achieve. What’s really great about the PowerSheets is that it comes with monthly pages designed to help you keep on track with your action plans, as well as review them.
It doesn’t hurt that it’s one of the prettiest planners out there, too. Just seeing its bright colors and holding it in my hands makes me happy!
If you’re looking for a tool to help you make sense of all your ideas and turn them into actionable items, I’d give the PowerSheets a try. Lara Casey – the creator of the goal planner – and her team have been perfecting this planner for many years, and it shows. The PowerSheets is a must-have for any avid goal-setters out there!
That’s it for this year’s list of 9 Best Planners to Achieve Your Goals. In the comments below, let me know which planner you’re going for this year, and why. I’d love to know!
How to make a plan and stick with it
Being a multi-passionate creative women that has coached and mentored so many other multi-passionate creative women I dare to say that I know a thing or two about how we’re wired, and what we’re made of.
When it comes to ideas about all the things we want to create, we have plenty. In fact, until we learn to organize them in a meaningful way, our minds can be extremely crowded places. When it comes to taking action, we’re hard workers, ambitious, tenacious. There’s no question that when someone else hands us a plan, we put all our multi-passionate creative skills to work to make it happen.
But here’s the thing. So many of us do this for other people, but not ourselves.
We clearly have the talents to turn our own dreams into reality. Why then is it so hard for us to work on our own goals successfully?
It’s a question I’ve asked myself many times. I struggled with this issue for many years. Everyone that knows me will tell you that I’ve always been ambitious, hard working, passionate, creative. I’ve always had plenty of ideas too. Things I would learn, art I would make, products I would create. There was never a lack of inspiration. But I never acted on it. Or if I did, the momentum would quickly fade away, and I’d lose interest (or so I told myself).
The truth is, I didn’t have a plan. I’m not saying that planning is the only struggle multi-passionate creative women need to overcome – we’re much too complex for that – but what I am saying is that having a plan is a powerful step to turn our creative ideas into more tangible things, and eventually reality.
How to have a plan?
Planning is a multi-layered process that can be done in many different ways. To be effective I believe that your planning system does needs to have at least these three components.
Write it down
A dream without a plan is just a dream. For the plan to come alive you need to write it down. It sounds trivial but I’ve seen it so many times. Multi-passionate creative women explaining all their ideas to me in so much detail and excitement, yet never actually writing them down – or acting on them. As soon as something finds its way onto paper though, unconscious processes get fired up and things start to materialize. I’m still amazed by it, but it works.
The way I encourage my clients to plan is first to get clear on their goals, then to take out a yearly calendar and map out when they’ll do what. This requires them to think about the steps, resources, time they’ll need to achieve their goals which – honestly – is the first step to achieve anything.
So find some time today to write down what you’ve been yearning to create. Then take out a calendar and map it out. You’ll be one step closer to your goals.
Make it a habit
Planning is not a one-off thing. It’s a habit. Writing down the steps to achieve your goal on a calendar isn’t enough. You need to go back, cut the steps up into smaller, more actionable pieces, plan those pieces out in your monthly or weekly calendar, etc. Planning is the journey to the destination, it’s that big middle part between starting something and getting to the finish line. That’s why it needs to be a habit, and why you need to be consistent at it.
My planning habits include sitting down on Sunday afternoon to plan out the week ahead in my planner, a morning review of my todos for the day, and monthly reviews to make sure I’m on track and haven’t strayed from the path too much.
My habits might work for you, or they might not. One thing I know about the creative mind is that it doesn’t conform easily. You’ll have to find out what works for you. It might take you a while to get there. Even if you don’t have a planner, or hate your todo list, try to carve out some time every day to think about what type of planning might work for you, and try things out.
Be flexible and gentle with yourself
There’s one big caveat to what I wrote above. When you’re working on creating a planning habit, be flexible and gentle with yourself. Don’t stockpile a million things on your to-do list every day. You’ll never get to the end of it, and will feel guilty for not getting there. Believe me, I speak from experience.
Planning isn’t about the amount of things you do (that’s productivity, we’ll get to that later in this series). Planning is about doing something consistently. One action every day, or every week. It’s about learning how your creativity works, and what she agrees to in terms of preparation. On my weekly planner for instance, I have two open days. Those are days I’m free to work on anything I want. I need that freedom in order to be able to sustain working three days based on a predefined schedule.
Find out what your creativity needs, and plan accordingly. But always be flexible, and gentle with yourself. The last thing you want is to feel guilty while working on your dreams.
If you want more tips to get unstuck, I’ve got great news for you! This tip is part of a series, you can find all entries here.