Kentucky Serendipity

Paper Planners? Yes — Paper. 18 January 2015

In this day of Google Calendar, Outlook, and similar tools being available on phones as well as on computers, some people still use paper planners. And I’m one of them. I’m not a Luddite and I use Google Calendar along with Todoist to keep track of things. However, I find that carrying a paper planner helps in many ways. It’s easy to jot a note in the planner while I’m out and about. I use it to hold business cards, brochures, receipts, and other printed items which I collect during the day. But the biggest advantage is this: While my computer calendar and to-do list contain many, many entries, my paper planner has only the things which I write in — the things which I choose to pay attention to today or this week. The paper planner helps me to stay focused on what needs to be done now, and not be distracted by other tasks.

Apparently many other people use paper planners as companies which produce them — Day-Timer, Moleskine, and Filofax among others — are still in business and selling their goods. I’ve used several commercial products over the years and found most of them to be good but not great: They just didn’t quite meet my needs. Other people have also found that the commercial products need to be tweaked or supplemented to suffice. And that’s where our “old” friend the computer can help. With a word processing or desktop publishing program and a printer, you can create a paper planner which suits your style and meets your needs. And you don’t have to start from scratch. Many people have created pages for planners and freely share them on the Internet.

If you use Microsoft Word, then the first stop for pages for your DIY planner will probably be the Office Templates gallery. The gallery has hundreds of templates, and many are useful for a planner. Another large site is Google Docs templates. Google Docs is free for personal use so if you find templates you like you can sign up (if you haven’t already) and start placing pages in your planner. A site which offers a variety of page styles in seven sizes is Printable Planners. They claim to have 424 page styles, and all of them are free. Eclipsed Moon (a blog) has a list of more than one pages available on the Internet. D*I*Y Planner has a collection of very nice pages which cover a wide range of planner needs. Incompetech has pages which aren’t specifically planner pages but are still useful at times: they have graph paper and special lined paper for notes, such as one for the Cornell system and one for music notation.

With the wide variety of templates available on the Internet, almost everyone can create a planner which suits their style and meets their needs.  If you have a need which isn’t met by any of the templates out there in cyberspace, then use your word processor or desktop publishing program to create it. And then share it on the Internet.