Monthly Reminders, Monthly Calendar, and Daily Plan

Although I've found the current planner printables on my Etsy shop useful, they don't fit what I want 100%. At times I'm annoyed by how particular I am, but I feel that if I'm making something for myself, it needs to be exactly what I want. My current planner printables allow me to easily plan out a whole month, but I wanted something that felt a bit more spacious. I needed more creative room. And even if I don't plan every day, there is a benefit to having a planner with a single page dedicated to each day.

Wanting more from my planner, I decided to do a redesign.

What I Wanted
  • More creative room
  • Ability to plan one main task every day.
  • Flexible daily pages
So with some research and Microsoft Word, I was able to create these clean, minimal, but useful planner pages. You can download them if you want to give them a try.  The dimensions are 5.5 in. x 8.5 in. If you're an INFP, these planner pages work well with the tips from my post series How I Learned to Plan as an INFP.


Download Minimal Half-Page Planner 


Download Monthly Calendar


Download Monthly Reminders



Download Daily Plan



Using the tips found at the My Life in a Bullet blog, I was able to create a very nice disc-bound planner using these pages. I have a tab for each month.





Printing

The best process for printing is:

1. Cut a 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper in half.

2. Load your printer with the half sized pages.

3. Open the PDFs in Adobe Reader. Make sure your printer is set to print at half page (5.5 in. x 8.5 in.)

4. And then print.

I recommend printing these pages on HP Premium 32 paper if you can (Not an affiliate link, BTW). I was really impressed with how well this paper takes ink and improves the print quality.

As far as layout goes, it's best to print the calendar first. Then on the back of the half of the calendar that has Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, print the monthly reminders page. On the back of the half of the calendar that has Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, print the daily page. Then print more daily pages front and back as needed.

You may have to play around with your printer or do a Google search to figure out how to do double sided printing with your printer.

Inspirations

The Hobonichi Techo

The Hononichi Techo is a Japanese planner and it's the perfect example of a flexible daily page. The pages can be used for notes, journaling, or for making a schedule. The right hand side of the daily page is designed so that you can make a schedule on the page if you want to, but you can totally disregard that if scheduling is not your thing.

My daily pages borrow from that concept, plus I love the grid-lines. What's different is that I've made the pages dateless. Plus at the top of page I've left a space for my most important task of the day and at the bottom for writing plans for tomorrow.

At first I thought that having a tomorrow section was unnecessary, but due to the way I often use my disc-bound planner folded over, this has been useful.

Assorted Planners from Mochithings

Mochithings is full of Korean planners with clean lines and thoughtful design. The monthly calendar was inspired by the layout of multiple planners. It has a ton of space for notes, stickers, and washi tape.

Evo Planner- Oracle Version

The Evo Planner is a planner I bought from Kickstarter. It's designed to work with "Brain Types" which are loosely related to Myers-Briggs thinking styles. For me they recommended the Oracle version of their planner, which has more room for notes and free thinking than their other planners. Overall I found  keeping up with filling out the daily categories of Work/Personal/Self-care hit and miss, but I did learn some important things.
  • Daily pages are great for minor journaling: small sketches,what I'm grateful for today, thoughts, the weather, etc. 
  • Having one important task for the day and getting it done feels awesome. 
  • Planning one or two simple activities for fun or self care during the day adds a nice balance.
I didn't want my planner to be as structured as the Evo planner. I think that was its downfall for me. But I have embraced daily pages and writing what I want to get done the most at the top of the page every day.

Feel free to play around with these planner pages for personal use (no reselling, please!), and let me know what you think.

Update: I've created also created a yearly index and a notes page for this planner. Click here for the post where you can download those for free as well. 

Another Update!: Now a self-care version of these printables are available in my Etsy shop. The set also includes a page for memories from the year and plans for next year.