How to Choose the Perfect Planner: 6 Options for Different Purposes

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

"Therapist", "secretary", "teacher", "archivist" - the right kind of diary will be your best assistant in achieving personal and professional goals.

In popular online stores there are up to 10,000 options on request "diary". There are many types of diaries, they are often given, but we either save most of them "for later", or fill them out in the first month and throw them away. Sometimes we supplement them with stickers, notebooks and electronic planners.

The usual typology of paper diaries is based on periods: dated or undated, for daily, weekly, or quarterly entries. But this does not suit everyone. It is best to choose a planner in terms of what you need and what you want to achieve.

Reduce Stress: Daily Therapist

At first glance, such a diary is needed to dispel boredom: it gives funny advice from Sherlock Holmes, baby Raccoon or Paolo Coelho, just cheers up with quotes and pictures. The main purpose of this category of diaries is not only to entertain, but also to reduce the level of stress, sometimes to allow you to procrastinate to your heart's content, to recharge your emotional battery.

The trend has been going on for several years now: bookstores are flooded with anti-stress diaries from the series "Paint me", "Destroy me", "Anti-diaries". Among these diaries, there are even templates for personal diaries.

Emotion tracking diaries will be helpful in developing emotional intelligence. Popular craft pages with patterns, doodles, mandalas, multi-colored sheets with art assignments, self-portraits for every day, funny phrases and mini-stories.

Therapists are needed to hear oneself, cope with stress, focus, and recharge emotionally.

Preserving important family history: the diary-archivist

For notes on a specific topic, this type of diary is suitable. Its purpose is to keep important records in one place, which we usually do not keep very systematically. Such a diary can be a good gift, the main thing is to know the interests and hobbies of the person being gifted.

The expectant mother will be able to track pregnancy day by day, young parents - to keep notes from the life of the baby, the whole family - to write down important dates and family histories in the family book. There are also reading diaries, cookbooks for recording your favorite recipes for every day, and gardener's diaries.

All diaries-archivists have a very important principle - to keep history systematically, whether it be records of family events or descriptions of seed types when planning seedlings.

Develop Good Habits and Skills: Daily Planner Teacher

It is both a diary and a self-instruction manual on a specific topic. For example, a daily planner with the Japanese Kakebo system will help to keep a family budget: at the beginning - theory and examples of filling, then - templates for every day for recording expenses and income. Such a diary will teach you to be frugal and manage your personal finances correctly.

You can learn English with a foreign language diary: keep ordinary notes and at the same time learn new words, grammar rules or phrases for communication.

There is a writer's diary - every day you read one piece of advice from famous writers, complete creative tasks, find inspiration, new ideas and a way out of creative dead ends.

There have even been invented diaries-manuals for parents - with advice on raising kids from 3 to 7 years old.

Diary teachers will help you develop self-discipline if you have a goal to instill in yourself a good habit, learn a foreign language, read more, eat right, and so on.

Plan a day, week, year: daily secretary

Most often they are represented when the word “diary” is used: business planners, “quarterly”, diaries with a schedule for every day and blocks for projects. Such assistants can be with good navigation and status covers. They are massively purchased by companies for employees, given as souvenirs. The goal is to help you keep notes on a daily basis, make to-do lists, and schedule appointments. Such diaries are laconic, strict and keep within the time frame. Suitable for office workers, but with a small number of projects and daily tasks.

Views:

• Scheduler. A week before your eyes, you record appointments, calls and other tasks.
• Business diary. Typically used for making notes every day throughout the year, keeping new contacts, making urgent notes, and scheduling cases for specific dates.
• Organizer. Contains contacts and short notes, often without a specific date.
• Notebook. Used for intensive note-taking, for example when working on a large project.

Daily secretaries are most of all supplanted by electronic counterparts, which are synchronized and speed up access to information from anywhere. It is useful to note the “secretary's” toolkit: the system of scheduling by periods is very important, it is the pivotal one for time management. The purpose of such a planner is to help you organize a segment of your life, be it a day, a week, a month, a quarter, or a year.

Focus on development: sniper diary

This type of diary is goal-setting. As a rule, each one contains its own author's methodology from a well-known business coach or consultant. Gleb Arkhangelsky, Igor Mann, Andrey Parabellum, Alexander Levitas, Yana Frank and dozens of other authors help to act according to the formula “believe in a dream → set a goal → plan → do → evaluate the result”.

Such a planner will help you work on priorities, habits, find motivation and achieve personal growth. Allows you to select the appropriate performance system and keep records with a focus on skill development and career planning.

Motivate and support yourself: the author's diary

There is another assistant that you will not find in bookstores and online stores. He is the most developing, motivating, knowing you to the smallest detail. This is a daily planner that you created for yourself - a personal collection of tools for self-organization and goal setting.

The author's diary is a unique compilation of all diary options. You choose convenient templates yourself, add therapy art sheets, assignments for developing habits, set personal and professional goals.

The constituent elements of the author's diary for example:

• 1 folder-cover A5 format, dense, with opening springs;
• printed block templates (A5 format): plan of the year, quarter, grid of tasks for the next month, plan of the week and day, templates of timings, results of meetings - everything that suits your planning system;
• 9 plastic dividers: two for planning blocks of periods (quarter, month, week, day), five for blocks of tasks by projects and two more separators for blocks of development;
• 3 pockets for stickers of different formats (often they are already sewn into the cover folders);
• text stickers (wide and narrow, transparent, paper, convenient sizes).

Additionally, you will need a hole punch for one hole and a set of colored gel pens.

Cover folder

Plastic dividers

Single hole puncher

Stickers

Pages from the planning block

Self-development page

It is also worth taking care of 2-3 folders for the archive of pages with personal plans and successes, as well as for project pages and notes with the results of meetings. Simple ring binders with dividers are fine. Once a month, irrelevant pages from the diary can be transferred to the archive, to the thematic block.

What we get: a system for personal planning of work and personal tasks, the formation and structuring of blocks for individual work, the availability of current statuses and plans at hand, a convenient archive of old records.

A diary is just one tool for managing personal performance, but it will definitely help you deal with deadlines and get out of the swamp of bad mood or creative stagnation. Experiment and have time to live!