I talked about using a 2026 monthly planner with notes pages as my 2027 writing planner because this was sitting unused, and all it took to make the calendar work was switching the Sunday start to a Monday start. Since I prefer Monday start anyway, I decided this would be easy.
While I love my 2026 writing planner and I use it every day, I don't use it to the extent I planned on. Instead of brilliant marketing strategies and carefully thought out goals and reflections on goal progress, I mostly just use it to keep track of how much writing I did that day.
Since I'm hardly using it the way I'd hoped, it made sense to repurpose an unused planner I already owned.
The caveat, though, was could I create my own daily boxes on the blank notes pages without hating it? I decided to spend some time creating the January 2027 spreads to see what I thought.
First up, the monthly title page. This was not strictly necessary, but I'm happier with decorated planners.
I didn't need to decorate the monthly calendar for January because I had already done it in January of 2026 with stickers I got from a seller online. Same with the dashboard page. Since those were just rote stickers set down in set locations, I didn't take any pictures of those pages to share.
First page of the month encompasses a partial week with three days.
Those blue blobs are supposed to be clouds. Clearly, I'm not an artist. I was trying to follow the Hubman and Chubgirl video tutorial on YouTube and her navy blue clouds looked great. Mine? Sigh.
But I got my three days set up. The square check boxes each represent 250 words and there are eight of them, so if I write 2000 words in the day, I can mark all the boxes. The colorful boxes at the bottom of the daily boxes are to record the total words written that day.
Here is the rest of the month, decorated with all boxes ready to go for writing in January 2027. Clearly, not an artist which is so frustrating. I also overdid some of the stickers, but I was trying to use up sheets so I could throw them away, so I over stickered.
I was a little sloppy lining the boxes, too. It's especially noticeable on the boxes where I used a blue marker instead of gray.
I had one page left over at the end of January, so I made it a notes page. Not sure how much use I'll get out of that because I didn't use them at all in 2026 after the first month or two, but there's space if I need it. I also have notes pages at the very back of the planner if I need it.
I'm hoping I get better at the artistic aspects as the year progresses. Can't get much worse, I guess.
