Why You Need a Planner for 2023: The Top Benefits and an Offer
I was never a planner.
As a kid, I’d let myself go with the flow — the teachers planned everything for us, anyway. I didn’t make study plans — didn’t even know what those were — I’d only studied before the exams and crossed my fingers. 🤞
I didn’t know better: my parents are no planners either. They only plan for next-day lunch and summer vacations. I don’t know if they planned their wedding, but I know from reliable sources (them) they didn’t plan to have my sister!
Back to my poor planning skills — as I discovered, they come hand in hand with procrastination, a talent I’ve been nourishing over the years. Without even trying! And it became clear once I started using a planner.
But I only used a planner with purpose during my first year as a PhD candidate, and it was not for planning.
The Benefits of Using a Planner, According to Most People
If you need only one reason to buy a planner, this is the one:
📅 Organization
Need to keep track of an important deadline? Just open your planner on that specific month/week/day and write it down. Nothing else structures your timeline this way.
And keeping track of upcoming events and deadlines brings extra advantages:
- Prioritize tasks: tell which tasks are urgent and which you can postpone.
- Anticipate workload: know, in advance, which weeks will be busier and which more relaxed.
Time management, people!
But planning was not my first intention. Oh, no, no, no! That would mean crossing my planning phobia, a.k.a. procrastination! 🙀
The Benefits of Using a Planner, For Me
I bought a planner to register all my tasks so I could know how I was spending my time during the workdays.
I would tell myself I was organizing my time and workload better. But secretly, I just wanted to get to the end of the month feeling that I’d done enough. That way, whenever I thought I had not made any progress, I could check if I had been working or wasting time.
And, spoiler alert: I wasted a lot of time. Yes, I tracked some deadlines and coming events, but I wasn’t planning. I focused on registering what I was doing each day.
Truth is, it ended up being another benefit of a planner:
✍️ Record keeping
Writing down all your tasks can help you a lot. When you get to the end of the year feeling like you accomplished nothing, you can grab that year’s planner and
(a) confirm how ineffective you were — all those hours rewriting the same paragraph! — or
(b) remember you wrote two 30,000-word e-books and got out of your comfort zone more times than you would have thought!
Registering everything helps you learn from your mistakes.
You can explore what went wrong this year and what you can change from now on. How far did you go on keeping up with your new year’s resolutions? What new things have you learned? Have you tried and failed at something? How good are your time management skills getting?
Self-development, people!
And you can go even further on that, if you use a journal. I wrote about it in another post:
What I Look For in A Planner
After years of collecting planners — and one year of bullet journaling — I developed a taste and some needs. I expect:
- Beauty
- Fair price
- Simplicity
- Space for creativity
Beauty? 🤨 You might ask, with a note of disdain. Yes, I want a nice-looking planner. Not only an eye-catching cover, but nice insides too. Let’s be honest: nobody wants dull spreads; we need something that cheers us up!
The problem is that, with planners, the more beautiful, the more 💰 they get. And I understand, at least partly: you are paying for the artistry.
But sometimes, the artistry is just too much — pages and pages that you need instructions to know how to use! That’s a bit exaggerated when you only need something practical. And by you, I mean me (unless you think the same — in that case, I mean we): I/we like things simple.
That is the reason I decided to try a bullet journal. Luckily, I did it back in 2020, when I had a lot of time to draw the spreads during the lockdown. And it was great for creativity and relaxation.
Until it wasn’t fun anymore. By the end of the year, it started feeling more like a duty, and I lost motivation. Now that I think about it, maybe it was too much planning for me!
Then I found out about Amazon KDP. I thought, why not make a planner of my liking and sell it on Amazon?
And that’s what I did.
🦄 A Planner of My Own Design
It’s an undated planner, so it doesn’t get outdated. It has:
- Year overview: for year-long projects (or collecting cute stickers)
- 12 monthly + 53 weekly spreads: a space for every moment of the year
- Readings log: to register all the books you’re not ashamed of reading
- Year’s review: to know how much of a procrastinator you really are
- More dotted pages with some drawings to color (or to ignore)
Why am I telling you this?
Well, I love my family, but I don’t want them to be the only ones to profit from my burst of creativity!
Here’s a sample 🎁
If you are anything like me, you will never buy a planner before you see the insides!
So here’s my offer: a PDF of my weekly spreads. It’s all in black and white, so you can include a bit of color if you’d like.
If you download and use it, let me know your opinion. Does it work for you? How could I improve it? Tell me in a comment or DM me anytime!
And here’s the planner
If you want to try the planner, which would make me very happy 🤗, you can choose one of three covers:
Having this planner will help you reach all your goals for 2023! — If you set reasonable goals and put work into accomplishing them.
Many thanks for reading! And even more if you decided to try the spread or the planner. 🙏 ❤️
