I’ve Bought This Essential Mini Productivity Gem for 16 Years in a Row — I Use It Every Single Day

I love a physical annual planner. I’m not one of those people who has a shared Google calendar with friends or my spouse, and I’m definitely not one of those people who can take each day on the fly and remember things I have to do or play it all by ear. I find that when I keep my to-dos digital rather than physical, I struggle to actually absorb and remember everything I’m supposed to do that day. Plus, my email is a nightmare (I have like 17,000 unread emails or more), so I’ve more or less given up on that as a productivity space. At the same time, my life will literally fall apart if I don’t keep track of things I have planned, from appointments to hangs with friends to a cleaning schedule. 

In any case, for all these reasons, I’ve kept a personal physical planner since my sophomore year of high school, if not earlier. And there’s one planner I’ve loved so much that I’ve bought it over and over again every year since. That’s the Moleskine Weekly Hard Cover Pocket Planner. 

Moleskine is a luxury notebook maker based in Milan, Italy. They’ve been making notebooks, planners, sketchbooks, leather backpacks, journals, and stationery since 1997. The planners come in three different sizes — pocket (my personal favorite), which is 3.5 x 5.5 inches, large, which is 5 x 8.25 inches, and XL, which is 7.5 x 9.75 inches — and with a hard or soft cover. I like a hard cover planner because I can take notes on the go without having to hold the planner against anything. 

Moleskine planners come in different layouts as well: daily, weekly, and monthly. Their daily planners feature a single day per page, the weekly planner shows a full week ( Monday through Sunday) on a single left-hand page, and on the right, there’s empty, lined space to take notes. A monthly planner shows a month at a time. 

I love my Moleskine Weekly Hard Cover Pocket Planner so much. It has everything I want in a planner. Because it’s small, I can bring my planner with me anywhere and in any sized bag. Small purse to go out with friends during the day? I can bring my planner! Big work bag to head to the office? I can also bring my planner! While I have nothing against larger notebooks (I carry them for my work to-do lists and other weekend chorekeeping), the versatility of the size of the pocket planner is impossible to beat.

Plus, because of the layout of the planner, even though my planner is quite small, I still have plenty of room to make any manner of notes for my upcoming week. Each day, which exists in a Monday to Sunday format on the left-hand side of the notebook, has about an inch of vertical space and 3.5 inches of horizontal space for me to write in. 

I write down daily appointments, my exercise schedule by day, whether or not I’ll be in the office, any hangs with friends I have scheduled, etc., on the left-hand side of the planner. On the right-hand side, I’ll add any miscellaneous notes for the week — do I need to schedule a doctor’s appointment? Is there anything I need to grab at the grocery store on my way home from work on Tuesday? Is there so much going on on Wednesday that I need spillover space to write my to-do list? The free space on the right side of the planner helps me do whatever I need to keep that all organized. 

Plus, the simple visualization of seeing a week at a time — rather than a single day, or being overwhelmed by a whole month — helps me mentally divide my year and months into smaller chunks, while also getting a sense of my whole week at the same time. 

Once again, I really just am not able to be a digital person when it comes to planning, to-do lists, and more. I need to physically write down my tasks for the week and have a separate physical notebook of to-do tasks for work (which is a whole other way I stay organized). So this is the perfect combination of physical, small, and broken up so that I can see my entire week (but have space to break down each day). I love it so much, I’ll never buy anything else — it’s been on every Christmas list I’ve put together since high school. 

Buy: Moleskine Weekly Hard Cover Pocket Planner, $21.95