The Best Day Planners

A new year means new goals and a renewed desire to get organized. To help you get there, we’ve rounded up our favorite day planners, from the professional to the quirky to the feminine. Even though it’s tempting to just stick with your phone’s calendar app, why not make 2018 the year you move away from the digital and rediscover how much fun and practical having a good old paper planner can be.

Every week we bring new products into our “test lab” and have the whole office vote on their favorites, based on quality, appearance, and price. The winners become the Top Picks of our Annual Guides, which showcase the best products of the year.

Maxwell Ryan, our Founder & CEO, chooses his own Top Pick as well, and demonstrates his favorites in our Annual Guide videos and weekly Instagram story series. Come back every Thursday for a new Annual Guide and Maxwell’s Top Pick Instagram story!

Voted the best by our office, this gorgeously simple agenda is an ideal option for the classy professional. It comes with a section to keep track of thank you notes and birthdays, has inspirational quotes scattered throughout, and is printed on extra thick, gold foil-accented paper.

If you’re looking for something small and sophisticated, consider this planner from FallinDesign. With pages for yearly, weekly and daily scheduling, this agenda can easily fit in your bag or be hauled around from meeting to meeting.

A classic Kate Spade design, this agenda is meant to complement your outfit more than your desk. It has gold foil details, laminated tabs, and a ribbon bookmark – the perfectly stylish accessory.

A throwback to traditional binder agendas, this planner lets you take out pages as you’ve finished them, giving you complete control over how you want your agenda to be organized. You’ll have to buy page inserts, but the personalization makes it worth it.

A great budget option, bloom daily planners are perfect for those who don’t want to take their scheduling too seriously. With playful cover designs, pockets, and end of month reflection questions, these planners are actually fun to maintain.

If you’re really looking for something fun and quirky, you can’t go wrong with any of the planners from ban.do. Filled with stickers, colorful illustrations, and cheeky quotes, you’ll be excited to turn every page.

This seriously cute planner comes packed with stickers, shopping lists, and little illustrations. It’s a toned-down version of the ban.do agendas, but comes with extra perks like wish lists, an addresses section, and pages to keep track of your favorite restaurants, book you’d like to read, and places you’d like to visit.

If you’d like a planner that’s larger and looks more like a traditional notebook, check out this festive agenda from Poketo. It has plenty of space for jotting down notes and appointments but the cover design doesn’t attract too much attention.

With a perfectly pretty cover design and minimalistic interior, this planner from Ferme á Papier can be started on any day – perfect for the casual notetaker. If you want your agenda to just be an agenda and not include extraneous sections, this is a great option.

2018 Tapestry Everyday 17-Month Planner

Rifle Paper Co. is every paper lover’s dream, so it’s no surprise that their planners are some of the best out there. They come in several different designs, have elegant gold accents throughout, and will keep you organized with pages for contacts, celebrations, and notes.

The Ashley Shelly Planner is nothing if not functional. A few examples of what’s inside include a clear zip pouch on the first page for storing loose papers, perforated bottom corners to create a built-in bookmark, monthly Creative Spreads, and even a 2018 Inspiration Board page.

For the seriously organization-obsessed Day Designers are the holy grail of planners. Each day is broken down into hourly segments, and includes a gratitude section and a top 3 to-do prompt. With new goal-setting worksheets, there’s pretty much no limit to what the Day Designer offers.

For a completely customizable agenda, look no further than the Erin Condren LifePlanner. You get to decide the cover design, layout, color scheme, calendar style, and coil option – truly everything to please even the most particular person.

1. Get in a routine. Pick a time to fill out your daily, weekly, and monthly sections – but not all at once. Tackling all three can get overwhelming, so get on a schedule of completing a little bit at a time.
2. Don’t try too hard to fill in everything. Most planners these days come with a variety of sections, from goal sheets to contacts to shopping lists. Don’t feel pressured to complete every single section of your agenda and instead do what comes naturally – it’ll save you a great deal of frustration.
3. Get creative. The best part of having a paper planner is the freedom to play around with it. Have some blank areas in your schedule? Doodle something! Love stickers and markers? Decorate your pages! Multi-colored highlighters? Color code your schedule! It’s the easiest way to make your planner truly yours.

• Day Planners That Will Make You Look Like a Boss
• No Time for Bullet Journaling? Inspiring Daily Planners to Try Instead
• Back to Basics: 5 Fantastic Paper Planners to Keep You Organized

• 11 Planners That Will Make 2018 Your Most Organized Year EVER — Refinery29
• How To Use A Planner (Without Getting Totally Overwhelmed) — Huffington Post
• What Happened When I Ditched My Smartphone For A Paper Planner — Fast Company