The Best Planners to Stay Organized & Achieve Your Goals
With 2021 making quite a loud crash into the world, it’s time to start taking some of our dreams and making them concrete goals. One of the ways to do this is to write them down. Did you know you are 42% more likely to achieve your goals if you write them down?
Taking your goals out of your head and putting them down on paper forces you to determine exactly what you want to accomplish. It also encourages you to ask questions and strategize how you can make them happen.
Grant Cardone (best selling author of the 10x Rule) actually writes his goals down 2x a day - once in the morning and once before bed. He notes,
"I want to wake up to it. I want to go to sleep to it and I want to dream with it...I want to write my goals down before I go to sleep at night because they are important to me, they are valuable to me and I get to wake up to them again tomorrow."
When writing down your goals, the more vivid you make them - the better. Think drawings, details, steps, photos, etc. You should almost be able to show your goal to someone and they will know exactly what it is you are trying to achieve. Those who write their goals vividly are 1.2 - 1.4 more likely to accomplish them.
Furthermore, writing down goals help us remember them neurologically, through encoding. With every thought and action, our brain determines the importance of them and either stores them into our long-term memory or discards them. Writing improves the encoding process of that specific thought. How cool is that?
To help you achieve your goals, here are our favorite goal-based planners to stop dreaming and start doing:
1. Passion Planner
Passion Planner gives you actually space to create mind maps of your long and short term goals. It also helps you FOCUS on the things that will help you get there. It helps you incorporate the goals into your weekly schedule and gives you clarity on where you need to make space to make those important things happen.
This planner includes mind maps, monthly and daily schedules. We love a daily schedule that is broken down by hour and this does just that! It also has room for a personal and work to-do list that’s organized by priority. Each week has a space for “infinity possibilities,” where you can jot notes, draw or doodle.
On top of that - each month has a reflection area, where you can answer questions about the previous month and how it helped you get closer to your big picture.
2. Self Journal
The Self Journal is a daily planner that assists you in increasing your productivity in your personal and professional life. Each journal holds 13 weeks, allowing you to track your goals as well as daily, weekly and monthly calendars to meet deadlines. It even has an evening gratitude section so you can reflect at your day and how it aligns with your short and long-term goals.
This journal can be less overwhelming than a yearly planner it focuses on hitting goals 3 months at a time. The founders say that the reasoning behind this is often people make yearly goals and put them off because they think they have time to accomplish it. With a 3-month deadline, there is more urgency to complete the things that really matter to you. It is also only 8.25” x 5.5", so it’s easy to travel with and carry with you every day.
The Journal includes: a 13-week roadmap (to define goals), 20 mile march (strategy for success), morning routine, evening routine, weekly layout and daily pages.
3. Productivity Planner
The Productivity Planner is brought to you from the same company who created popular Five Minute Journal. It uses the Pomodoro Technique as the basis of its product. It empowers you to focus your mental energy on the most meaningful tasks of every day.
The planner is set up “in fives.” You set the five most important tasks of the week, then five secondary tasks and then five additional tasks. Each day you set out your five tasks for that day and rank them by importance. The whole point of this is that you cannot move on to the next task until the one before it is complete. it forces you to focus on one thing at a time!
At the end of the week, the planner prompts you to review what you were able to accomplish on your list and what you learned from it.
This planner is broken down into 90-day sections and provides a clear layout on how to focus on what is important, while also allowing space for you to brain dump all the other tasks on your mind. The planner includes a weekly review, which guides you through the process of planning out your week. It also has room for your to reflect on your wins and understand lessons learned. The Daily pages include space for your 3 big daily tasks, your longer to-do list, time blocking to map your day and a full page to brain dump your thoughts and daily notes. This planner also helps you break down your goals into quarterly and weekly action items - with space to track your progress.
A unique benefit of this journal is the Daily Rituals section. It includes space for morning ritual, workday startup ritual, workday shutdown ritual, and evening ritual. This is a great way to develop and keep habits to bookend your day!
Cheers,
** sources
- Inc.com
- Forbes.com