My first year out of college, my manager identified time management as a skill I could improve. Becoming a better manager of my time would help me move up the corporate ranks. So, I dutifully enrolled in an employee training seminar. I was 15 minutes late to the class. Clearly, I needed that class! The sad thing is, I didn’t miss much. Time management skills at the time consisted of explaining how to use a daily planner. There was no thought of what type of planner was the best planner for your personality and work style. There was only one style. You learned to use it, or else.
Traditional Daily Planner
The traditional daily planner that was demonstrated in that class consisted of a series of lines on a page representing your time during work hours. Initially, this was from 8am to 5pm, until one company became famous for “giving you an extra hour each day”, by starting their planners at 7am. Now that many people schedule early morning gym sessions, working dinners, and after-hours teleconferences with people halfway around the globe, most planners give you a full day, or at least some blank space before and after the lines to schedule things outside the standard work day.
These planners work best for people whose work or activities fall neatly into scheduled blocks. If you are a real estate professional, a lawyer, or someone who provides professional services on an hourly basis, a traditional daily planner may be the best planner for you.
Enhanced Daily Planner
Enhanced daily planners operate on the theory that you can only manage what is measured. Therefore, they include not only the traditional time blocks of the daily planner. They also include blocks to measure and manage other things, such as:
- how many glasses of water you drink
- how often you work out
- what your caloric intake is
- whether or not you met your personal daily goal
Enhanced daily planners are the best planners for people who want help recording and tracking their new habits. They work best for people who are detail oriented, and who will actually use them to record the level of detail required for them to be effective. The planner shown in the image for this article is an enhanced week-at-a-glance planner.
Inspirational Daily Planner
Inspirational daily planners are hybrids of journals and planners. While they contain some blocks for time, these are often simply “morning”, “lunch”, and “afternoon”. There are also open blocks that you can use to record important details for the day, notes, ideas, or other free-form information. Finally, there are inspirational sayings, either on every day, or on every few days. These sayings may be religious, business-oriented, or motivational.
Inspirational daily planners are excellent for people who have no more than a few meetings during a day, usually with clients. However, they need a place to record information about those meetings, such as location, phone numbers, or action items. People who use these types of planners find that their time between meetings is easily managed, and does not need to be precisely billed. They tend to view their planners as archives of information as much as schedules.
Multi-Project Daily Planner
The multi-project daily planner helps people with multiple ongoing roles to easily block out their time based on their various roles. These can also be used by multiple people who share a single planner, to coordinate their actions. Sometimes they are called family planners, with one column of each day being assigned to each person in a family. Other times they are called life planners, with each column being assigned to one area of your life, such as finances or relationships, to ensure that you are giving adequate time and attention to multiple areas of your life.
These are the best planners for people who are running many simultaneous projects or small businesses. They make it very easy to see at a glance how much of your time is going to each of your focus areas.
Personal Growth Daily Planner
The personal growth daily planner takes the inspirational daily planner and kicks it up a notch. There are spaces in each day to record an intention for the day, things you are grateful for, and what steps you will take to move forward in your personal development. Often, they come with stickers or other items to add color and visual impact to the pages.
These are the best planners for people who are doing internal work rather than external work. By combining a gratitude journal with a daily planner, it reinforces reviewing and assessing your day, instead of treating it as a list of things to check off as being done.
Task-oriented Daily Planner
A task-oriented daily planner is designed for people who have few scheduled events, but quite a bit of work to do on a number of different projects. There are no time blocks at all. Instead, there are project blocks, and prioritized lists of tasks associated with those projects on each day.
These are ideal planners for modern creatives or contract employees, who are juggling projects for many different clients at the same time. It is, in fact, the type of planner I use, to manage my speaking, writing, coaching, and non-profit obligations. If you know that you need to get certain things done on certain days, but it doesn’t matter when during the day you do them, this might be the best planner for you.
The Best Planner
Clearly, then, there is no one best planner. It depends entirely on the type of work you do, and your personal goals. To determine which planner is the best for you, consider these questions. Do you:
- have many meetings during a day?
- meet with clients?
- work on billable hours?
- own or operate multiple businesses?
- work on multiple projects simultaneously?
- want to reinforce new habits?
- want to focus on multiple areas of your life?
- care when during a day you accomplish a task?
