Best Planners and Organizers 2021 to Stay Focused & Achieve Goals

7 min readJul 2, 2021

This post is originally published at https://eggcellentwork.com.

The best planners and organizers 2021 has to offer can help you stay focused and achieve your goals come in three flavors:

1. Paper-based planners ranging from leather-bound weekly planners to gridded paper calendar.

2. Hybrid (mostly free) computer generated calendars embedded as templates in office applications like Microsoft Word and Excel.

3. Windows, Mac, and smartphone planners, and online calendar apps

Before we discuss how those three best planners and organizers 2021 (or any year) can help you in your daily work, school, family, and personal life, here are a few reasons why you should use them in the first place:

How a daily planner can help you stay focused and achieve your goals

Help you manage your crowded schedule.

They say that time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once, but if you are discovering that there is never enough time to do everything you need, you’re not doing it right. You’re probably bouncing from one unfinished task to the next. In that case, you’re not considering the big picture.

Use a planner to schedule each thing you need to do-i.e., each event, appointment, errand, and job-and you’ll be able to focus on what to expect without running out of time. Setting due dates for anything you cannot complete quickly will get you into the habit of staying on track and give you that extra time to cope with unexpected delays.

Help you be more productive

Productivity doesn’t only apply to your job. You can be productive at home projects that you have been putting off or school assignments that will only become more difficult if you don’t begin them early.

Use a planner to stay on track with everything you know you need to complete, and you will experience the energizing motivation to move on to the next task efficiently and without the lingering guilt of procrastination.

Release and remove lots of stress

Scarlett O’Hara in the movie Gone With the Wind often said words to the effect, “I’ll think about that tomorrow.” While that was Scarlett’s way of coping with indecisiveness, her mindset did relieve the stress of the moment.

Today the best planners and organizers 2021 has to offer relieve the stress without the Scarlett O’Hara dysfunctional behavior. Simply entering a reminder with a deadline on a planning calendar relieves the stress and worry that you will overlook an important commitment, appointment, or fail to start a task on time.

Free up more time to be creative

Sticking to a schedule and getting the mandatory tasks completed frequently generates free time for the creative things you love to do. Remove the stress from your day and see how the once-blocked creative juices begin to flow again.

Improve your record keeping

You can even use the scheduling planning process as a creative activity and an indispensable resource as a journal and record of daily activities and basis for future scheduling. When was the last date you visited the dentist? How about the last time you called your parents? In these busy times our memory is not our most reliable tool. An entry on a planning calendar works best.

The best planners and organizers 2021 has to offer, by type

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Paper-based

You don’t have to be handy on a computer or a fast thumb-typist on your iPhone to stay focused and productive. A good paper planner will work quite well. In fact, some users tend to feel more engaged in their scheduling by actually writing down a to-do list and schedule tracking on paper. Paper planners at the end of the year become a permanent physical record, somewhat of an artifact or time capsule that you can keep beyond the time when software becomes obsolete or computer files are deleted.

Paper planners come in a variety of types: daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly, and customizable planners. The following are typical examples of each:

Two daily planners

The 5-Second Journal is for the free-thinker who prefers the day-by-day structured approach to planning. This planner allows you to fill in your daily projects, including times and hour-by-hour tracking to prevent burnout. It is reasonably priced at $15 on Amazon.

Clever Fox Planner Daily

At $24.99 on Amazon, this daily planner has six months of individual separate pages for each day of the week. It provides space for daily goals, priorities, and personal to-do lists and a daily productivity review section. It is undated and the user can begin at any time without wasting unused dates.

Two Weekly planners

The JSTORY Large Weekly Planner

This is a 7.2 x 10.1-inch weekly planner made to last. Its larger size and reasonable cost ($15 on Amazon) is the right size for the busy student. Its format and room for detailed note taking is ideal for keeping a to-do list, personal diary, as well as a host of other uses.

Delane Appointment Planner 2021–2022

This is a traditional spiral bound hourly planner and weekly appointment book. It is an ideal academic organizer and great for teachers, students, and business people. Designed to lay flat it breaks down the day into 15-minute increments with an 8.5 x 11-inch size perfect for the purse, briefcase or student tote. ($21.95 at Amazon.)

Two monthly planners

At-A-Glance Three Year-Monthly Planner

At a somewhat steeper price of about $54 on Amazon, this calendar is for “big-picture” thinkers and planners, who don’t sweat the small stuff and who ignore things that don’t fit into their vision. However, there are things that cannot be overlooked, like birthdays anniversaries, doctor’s appointments, and calling your mom. The good news is that the calendar covers three years and is a permanent record of 1,095 daily jottings of the most important thing you planned each day.

2021–2025 Monthly Five Year Planner

This number-one best-selling ($7.89 on Amazon) calendar runs until 2025 with a one-month span for each double page. It has 140 pages with a monthly focus on goals, with a to-do list and plan for next month.

Two quarterly planners

BestSelf Co. the Self Journal

A best-selling planner and journal ($32 on Amazon), this is an undated 13-week planner. It features a daily tracker of goals with self-congratulation and the acknowledgement of the power of positive thinking. This one is definitely for high achievers, and you’ll need to buy four of them to cover a year.

Sky Blue 90-day, 3-Monthly Quarterly Dry-Erasable Wall Calendar Planner

Available in a variety of sizes and prices ranging from $21.95 to $29.95 on Amazon, this blank calendar has obvious quick-look benefits for any quarterly planning operation.

A customizable planner

Plum Paper Customizable Planner

From $29 at Plum Paper, the customizable planners come in three sizes, and you can choose between daily and monthly and binding styles with spiral and ring-bound options.

For a more complete listing of the variety of paper-based calendars, see this online NY Mag article.

Hybrid (mostly free) computer generated calendars

Looking for free online calendar templates that you can customize, print, and share? They are everywhere on the web and are designed for specialized usages. However, the average user needs to go no further than Microsoft’s Calendar Templates. Downloads are free for Microsoft Office users.

Also, for Outlook e-mail subscribers, the to-do and calendar planners provide instant planning and task to-do list tracking. The Outlook Calendar is easy to use and users can see daily, weekly, or monthly views.

Mac, and iOS calendars

The Mac OS has a free calendar and reminder app. The calendar has daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly views. The reminder app is essentially a list of scheduled appointments and to-do items with beginning and ending dates that generate reminders to the user.

Calendar applications available by online prescription

Subscription-based online apps do everything from appointment to resource scheduling. One online service that checks al the boxes is AppointmentPlus. For a comparison list of popular calendar applications log on to Capterra’s Calendar Applications webpage.

Conclusion

Using scheduling tools are part of the best personal, work, and academic practices to help you stay focused and achieve your goals. The benefits in time management and stress reduction as well as increased productivity are well-known.

The best planners and organizers 2021 has to offer can either be wholly paper based, downloadable computer-generated templates, or calendar apps that do more than list appointments.

Paper-based planners come in a variety of formats ranging from daily, to weekly, to five-year. Computer-generated (and mostly free) calendars are available from a variety of providers, with Microsoft Office-compatible templates the easiest to use.

Both Windows and Mac operating systems come preloaded with handy calendar and to-do list trackers. Plan well and keep to your schedule and goals to free up more time to be creative in your work and personal life.

Prescription-based calendar applications can do more than just keep schedules and to-do lists. They can fully integrate the subscriber’s calendar with online booking and speedy mobile apps for everyone to stay connected, synched and secure.

Originally published at https://eggcellentwork.com.