Do you use a planner or organizer?

[rancher]

Every so often I'm hit with the urge to have a physical notebook for tracking various things, such as my experiments, life events, mood health fitness, reflections on life, and so on. But most planners on the market are waaay too big for me (I don't need a full page per day! All that empty space intimidates me!) and too complex so I decided to cook up a minimalist weekly tracker wen the urge hit me this year.

It opens to a spread of the year and each day is about 7cm x 7cm (2.75" x 2.75")



Then each month begins with a spread of the month; a column is 7cm (2.75") wide with an implied height of 2.6cm (1") per day with a bit of spare space at the end of the month, more for February:



Finally, each week until the next month gets a spread. There's a bonus space that also has the ISO week number. Each square here is 7cm x 10cm (2.75" x 4") which is plenty of space for my purposes. If you're on a 4 day a week work schedule, it's split pretty well between the work week and free time. To prevent duplicating the week spreads, each week "belongs" to whatever month the Thursday of the week belongs to.



If you're familiar with regular organizers, you can probably see what I mean about it being a "minimalist" planner. There's no sunday-saturday 5 week chart calendars for the month anywhere, no holidays, or any other fluff. Printing this as a booklet on A4 pages should only require about 34 pages of printer paper which makes it very cheap to print.

Do you guys use any physical planners or organizers? I would love to hear about what helps you stay organized. I make the PDF for this organizer with CSS, HTML templates, and a simple python script, so if you want to spin this idea off and you are a hacker type, it should be easy.

If anyone else has a need for minimalist printable planners I'm curious what "mods" would be useful to you besides year, month, and week. One assumption I make is that if someone has a lot of things going on that they need to track/schedule all the time, they'll either go for a 1 "page per day" type planner or just use their phone/computer to track their schedule... as an aside, if you are in the market for a "page per day" notebook, I would recommend the Hobonichi Techo because they are pretty classy & they were made by the MOTHER games guy ... supporting him is cool

This project is absolutely public domain. Savvy business types can steal this project and sell their own minimalist planners for $15 a pop, drastically undercutting the competition and rake in a fortune in their sleep.

Blog entry with link to source code: https://4x13.net/blog/journal1.html

[Blond]

Do you guys use any physical planners or organizers?

When I was a kid, like in middle school, I used to have a planner. But not a regular one, no. A planner based on the calendar from Persona 3. That summer, I played the game for the first time, and I loved it, so I thought to myself, “Why not use the calendar system for my day-to-day life?” And that school year happened to coincide with 2020. So yeah, by the end of it, I literally wrote “Wake up, eat, game, sleep.”

I tried using a physical organizer by March, but I came to the realization that it just isn’t for me.

[cidoku]

I was given one at work and it's pretty and all but I can't bother to use it. Gotta be spontaneous, you know? Never used a digital one either; I just keep everything in a long .txt file that I never actually read.

[Amlux]

I use calcure. It's a CLI calendar/planner:
https://github.com/anufrievroman/calcure

For larger-scale projects, I just have .txt files.