Step-by-step guide on how to make a daily planner

The best way to start a new year is to organize your days effectively. But, with so many methods and productivity hacks out there, it’s hard to find an approach that works for you.

Productivity experts agree that a good time management strategy does more than manage your daily schedule—it prioritizes your unique daily life and project tasks. So why not create your own daily planner?

All you need is a bit of insight into your workflow, advice from the world's top organizers, and Linearity Curve's intuitive design tools. Curve makes it easy to design a custom daily planner that whips any to-do list into shape and helps build healthy habits.

As a designer, you can easily productize daily planners as an essential piece of stationery. Marketers can use this design to create branded merchandise perfect for goal-setting at the beginning of the year. And it’s suitable for personal use, too.

No matter your skill level as a designer, marketer, or just someone who wants to take charge of their organizational planning, this guide will show you how to make a daily planner easily.

Let’s get the year off to the right start—it’s time to get organized.

6 steps to making a winning daily planner

Find your workflow

This is the planning stage of your design. Designing your daily planner begins with knowing there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to planning your day. Experiment with various strategies to enhance productivity for your task list and task prioritization.

Here are some achievable steps toward your goals, and what they could look like on your planner:

Prioritize and break down tasks

• Identify 2–3 top priorities: Don't overload your day. Focus on the most important tasks that will move you closest to your goals.
• Break down large tasks: Divide complex projects into smaller, actionable steps to avoid productivity gaps. This also makes them less daunting and easier to track progress.

How ‘prioritizing tasks’ could look on a planner: Use the Eisenhower Matrix to categorize tasks based on urgency and importance to prioritize effectively.

 Image source: Productivity Matrix Planner Pinterest

Schedule realistically

• Estimate task duration: Be honest about how long each task will realistically take. Don't overschedule yourself.
• Build in buffer time: Unexpected situations arise. Buffer time gives you breathing room and prevents your schedule from falling apart.
• Consider your energy levels: Schedule demanding tasks when you're most focused (like in the morning) and simpler tasks for times when your energy dips.

How ‘realistic scheduling’ could look like on a planner: Time management expert Laura Vanderkam advises time-boxing, which involves allocating specific time slots for tasks and sticking to them, promoting focus, and preventing procrastination.

Image source: Timeboxing Planner Pinterest

Structure your day

• Create a morning routine: Your personal life is fundamental to your overall well-being, so start your day with healthy habits that set the tone for productivity.
• Batch similar tasks: Group similar activities together to minimize context switching and maximize focus.
• Schedule breaks: Avoid burnout by taking short breaks throughout the day to refresh your mind and body.

How ‘avoiding burnout’ could look like on a planner: Mental-health advocate Bex Spiller set up The Anti-Burnout Club in 2021, and it’s grown exponentially since then. Her Anti-burnout journal (published in 2022) makes space for gratitude (which we think is super important), motivational quotes, and a place to mark how users felt about their day using simple graphics.

 Image source: Anti-burnout journal Amazon

Set yourself up for success:

• Find a personal planner system that works for you. Your existing approach to planning is crucial to how it works going forward. Think about whether you’ll design a digital planner, such as a fillable PDF, or a printed planner.
• Keep your plan visible. Place your planner where you'll see it regularly, somewhere like your computer desktop, physical desk, or even your bedside table.
• Regularly assess your plan and adjust it based on progress, priorities, and unexpected events.

Now that you’ve planned the various components of your daily planner, it’s time to put them together.

Start a new document

If you’ve never used Linearity Curve before, here’s how you can set up a new document quickly and easily.

Look for the plus sign button (+) in two convenient spots: the top right corner of the screen or the "New file" card with a big plus sign in the Gallery.

Select New Document to open the Document Picker, which is perfect for projects with specific dimensions. Click Custom Size at the top of the window.

Give your document a descriptive name to easily identify it later. Enter your desired width and height using the preferred units (pixels, inches, etc.).

Hit Create to watch your custom canvas come alive.

Get this template

Get this template

If you have an existing design document, you can bring your work from another source and give it a Linearity makeover. Linearity Curve is highly compatible with other design software, like Sketch and Adobe Illustrator.

You can also quickly access your five most-used templates for instant convenience in the Documents menu by selecting the Custom tab.

Put all your elements together

Now that the research part of your daily planner is behind you, let’s draft how to put it together in your layout.

Add some blank blocks that allow you to set up priority categories. Create space for how you will connect that with smaller daily task lists and future tasks, individual task meetings, and then maybe somewhere for you to list how that will work according to your typical day.

Make a block for personal priorities and daily activities where you could add appointment slots for doctor appointments, special events, and other important personal timeboxes.

Add space for notes and inspirational quotes, and leave room to review each day. You can also add a section to prepare for the next day.

Use the Shape Tool and the Text Tool to lay out the separate elements.

Create your design

It's time to transform your rough design into something beautiful.

Remember, the purpose of a daily planner is to keep you organized. So, try to keep the layout simple, clear, and relatively calming—you can always spice things up later, but let's get the basics working first.

We set a calm color theme as the base for our document, working with light shades in the background for sections where we’ll add notes. We used darker shades for the primary sections that will contain high-level information. Only use three to four colors (including your accent color) to avoid overwhelming the design.

You can combine a serif typeface like Plantin (an inspiration and precursor to the infamous Times New Roman typeface) with Helvetica, creating a crossover font pairing that is both classic and contemporary.

Add illustrations and icons

Once your layout is singing, add the finishing touches like tick-boxes, rule lines, and vector graphics to bring some life into the design.

Add a few boxes next to priority items to check the status of priorities and tick items off your lists when done. Select the Shape Tool, draw a small square, remove the default Fill color, and add a Stroke around the shape.

To add rule lines for note-taking begin with the Shape Builder tool. At this stage, it’s always a good idea to set up Guides to help you precisely align objects on your Artboard and draw evenly-spaced lines.

Now that everything is aligned, add some inspiring quotes and graphic elements to your design, bringing life to quiet corners and highlighting important elements.

You could design these yourself, or take advantage of Linearity Curve’s free Iconator library. You have access to over 80,000 royalty-free icons that can be used in all your projects.

Our daily planner design looks like desk stationery, so we found an elegant bookmark icon and placed it in the bottom-right corner of the design.

Export and conquer

If you want your design to be digitally fillable, shareable, and also printable, exporting it as a PDF is the perfect solution.

Click the Export menu at the top right corner of your screen.

From there, access the Export popover: This handy menu holds the keys to various file formats, including PDF.

Click the PDF button. This launches the PDF Preview Options, where you can customize your file export.

Choose your Artboard options, like the single Artboard or all Artboards (which will include every Artboard in your document).

Click Export, and you’re ready to conquer your year.

Keep the momentum going

A more organized year ahead is only a few clicks away, so keep the #newyearnewme energy going by perfecting your Linearity Curve skills. With hundreds of tutorials, how-tos, and the launch of Linearity Move (could 2024 be your animation year?), there’s something for everyone to learn.

Bring motion in-house

Animate marketing assets in seconds with Linearity Move.

Get Started

Take the power of design into your hands and start the year by signing up for a free Linearity Curve Starter account today. The free Starter plan is available now.

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