You can walk into any Post Office or stationery store and buy a paper planner. There’s also heaps to choose from online.
But a do-it-yourself planner brings customization and scalability. Examples of this are when you don’t want to have to order a new set of custom-print pages from your store-bought planner’s manufacturer every time you run out of one pad. Or maybe you’re thinking about test-driving a paper solution, so you want to test before you pay.
With a D*I*Y Planner, you can add, replace, and reshuffle pages very easily. Refills are a matter of printing a new set of pages.
The D*I*Y Planner system is an extensive library of PDF templates from which you can pick and choose. Then, print the pages you need and assemble your planner. You can also easily make D*I*Y Planners for you or your colleagues that cover custom timelines such as the duration of a particular project.
Because it is yours, you can streamline it by, for example, carrying around only the next couple of weeks’ worth of information (to help keep it thin and portable).
To build your D*I*Y Planner, perform the following two steps:
1) decide on the size and type of planner you want to create. The D*I*Y Planner site has templates available to print in several sizes:
* Classic (half pages of 8 1/2×11-inch paper, quite common in North America)
* Letter size (8 1/2×11-inch paper)
* A4 (the equivalent to letter size in pretty much every country outside North America)
* A5 (half of A4 size)
* Hipster PDA (index cards)
2) Download the template kit you need from http://diyplanner.com/templates/official. It will be in PDF format, so you can use any PDF reader (i.e. Adobe Acrobat or Foxit )to open and print the templates. Of course, depending on the size you choose, you may have to cut the paper in half (for Classic and A5) and punch holes in it to fit it inside a binder. The Hipster PDA index-card–sized version can be held together with a small binder clip.
Since its your planner, you print only as many pages of the forms as you need. If you decide to change the planner size you use, or if you need to add pages for certain kinds of information (another address-book page, or a financial ledger page for a particular project, or even just larger daily calendar pages to write your appointments), simply print the appropriate pages and reassemble or add them to your planner.
The system offers a wide of templates, including :
Calendar, to-do lists, and note-taking pages
Stephen Covey’s priority matrix
David Allen’s Getting Things Done system buckets (such as Next Actions, Waiting, Projects)
Mind maps
A photographer release form
Book notes
Storyboard
Shopping lists
Address book
Contact logs (phone call/email/IM log of contacts)
Financial ledger
Meeting agenda
Goals tracker
Lined horizontal, lined vertical, and graph paper
Project outline and notes forms
