Technology is great, but sometimes you need the feel of pen on paper. These printable planners and sheets will help you get things done without needing an app or computer.
There is a simplicity to printable planners that apps can’t match. These are more flexible, and they don’t send you notifications that distract you from what needs to be done. Plus, there is no learning involved. Print out the planner, fill in the blanks, and you’re ready.
Paulina’s Daily Planner: Plan Your Day, and Stay Healthy Too
Graphic designer Paulina has created her own daily planner that you can download and print. While it’s a daily planner, it also does a few more things to ensure you’re at your best.
Fill in today’s date and write down up to eight tasks to finish for the day. You can add a few notes too. After the planning, it’s important to ensure you stay healthy. So Paulina’s planner ensures you have a checklist for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks, to make sure you don’t skip meals. There are also seven glasses of hydration to remember to drink water. And the exercise tab has different ways to stay fit.
At the end of the day, you can also use the planner to analyze how you’ve done. Fill a couple of simple boxes to know how many tasks are completed and overdue. And then choose whether overall, you think it’s a productive day or not.
The planner prints in an A5 size, so a standard A4 or Letter page will give you two planners per page. It’s free, but you can also buy a pack of three, each with 50 sheets in spiral binding.
Productivity Meter: Visual, Colorful Measure of Achievements
Usually, printable planners are just about putting pen on paper to fill in the blanks. That’s why The Petite Planner’s Productivity Meter stands out from the rest with its colorful and visual approach to planning.
Here’s how it works. You download the template for the meter, either in horizontal or vertical format. Each meter is about one large goal, with several small tasks. Each type of task has its own color. Divide the meter into small sections for each color. Outside the meter, write timeframes or deadlines. You fill up the meter with a color whenever you finish the task. It’ll take some getting used to, but once you do it, this visual task list will be much more satisfying than checking off a box on a piece of paper.
The Productivity Meter has a similar mind hack as the “Done List” as they both rely on telling you how much you have achieved in any task, rather than how much is left to do. As the meter fills up, you’ll get a sense of accomplishment and know what to tackle next.
Quarterly Review: Take Stock of Your Goals and Learnings
It’s easy to say that you should take stock of your life and figure out the next steps. But how do you go about doing that? The Quarterly Review printable sheet is an excellent guide that puts this abstract question into a series of actionable steps.
As the name suggests, it’s ideal if you do this every quarter, i.e. three months or 90 days. You’ll need to sign up to get the printable and its sheet of questions, which is the more important part.
The printable plots your last and next quarters side-by-side. A series of questions takes you through what to fill in the last quarter, such as what went well (with sub-questions), what could have been better (with sub-questions), what was unexpected, how you feel about the quarter, and which learnings can you take forward to the next.
The next quarter’s section has similar questions to fill out on the chart. For example, you start with how you want to feel at the end of the next quarter, which actions you need to complete, what are the main goals or priorities, and so on. It also forces you to set one goal for something that would affect your life in a meaningful way.
Through this series of questions and answers, you’ll be able to get a realistic picture of how your life has been and where you want your life to go. Keep doing this Quarterly Review every three months, it’s the best way to keep moving forward while improving on your mistakes. In fact, you can even do it as a team, as this is an essential printable planner for office workers.
Simplified’s Printables: 40 Free Printables for Every Need
Lifestyle author Emily Ley’s website Simplified has a bunch of free printable planners for every type of need. You will have to sign up for the newsletter to download them, but the collection is worth it.
The variety of printables on offer is staggering. You get daily, weekly, and monthly calendars and planners. There are “brain dump” templates, blog planners, meetings for office and family, party planners, and checklists for all kinds of occasions. And of course, there’s the productivity staple, a gratitude journal template.
Each of these is a single-page productivity planner, and you can distinguish between categories based on the background color. Most of them also have a color element on the page, but it’s only to make it look better, you can still use it with a black-and-white printer.
2019 Printable Planner: Better Than a Calendar for the New Year
We aren’t too far from the new year, so let’s prep for it with a planner made for 2019. Make Your Own Zone’s free printable will make you realize why we still need paper planners in the smartphone age.
The planner is available in two options: with the week starting on Monday or starting on Sunday. The Monday-start is a better option, since it gives you more room for the weekdays, which is when you would be getting more things done. For something that requires attention throughout the week, use the “Notes” box at the bottom.
There are vertical and horizontal layouts available for the planner, so pick what you prefer. The vertical looks better to us, since you can use it as a simple to-do list or even add a few notes from the bottom-up.
The website also includes links to the 2018 version of the planner, in case you want to get started right away without waiting till the new year rolls around.
Try Other Planners
The thing with to-do lists, planners, and other productivity methods is that nothing is a one-size-fits-all solution. Different techniques work for different people, which is why it’s important to identify the right planner for you and print it out.
For example, if time management is your big problem, then try a time-blocking printable planner. These planners give you time-based goals for your tasks, helping you get things done before deadlines.
Read the full article: 5 Printable Productivity Planners and Templates to Get Things Done
