Nothing I mention in this post is sponsored. All products were purchased by me.
Planners are always up in the air until the order is placed. I'm always looking for the next best thing and so I'll check out new planners.
There were two planners that I looked at this year, both for my second brain, and both were rejected. One of them only had six daily pages each week. Excuse me? There are seven days. I am not combining two days.
The other one had a weekly overview page and then the seven days of the week, but there wasn't a vertical weekly for tracking (I can't plan in a vertical) and there were no blank pages to create my dashboard. I guess this planner's weekly overview was supposed to be a dashboard, but it wasn't giving me what I like.
Both of these planners have exploded in the planner YouTube sphere.
I haven't made my final decision on my second brain planner--the most important planner in my lineup. I ordered two options. I didn't mean to buy two, but here we are anyway. I ordered a softcover Complete Planner in A5 size in Vertical weekly from Sterling Ink. My 2026 planner was a hardcover Complete Planner (Hardcover was the only option) and I loved it a lot. I had two friction points with the planner. One, the hardcover. That was fixed. Two, the duplicate weeklies when a week splits across a month. This is still in the planner for 2027 and will still cause friction for me.
Which is why I picked up a Just Scribble A5 Vertical One Volume planner. It's softcover and the layout is very similar to the Complete, but the weekly spreads aren't repeated. (I don't have it yet, but I'm certain I'm right about this.) When I have both planners, I'll flip through them side by side and make my final decision.
The rest of the line up:
Dopamine Writing Planner: This is the one I decorate and color in circles for word count. Read more about it here. I started using this in 2026 for word count and discovered that coloring in circles for every 250 words worked. For 2027 I'm adding the craft element to a 2026 planner that I've re-dated for 2027.
Nuts and Bolts Writing Planner: I tried to do this in the dopamine planner and it didn't work for me. I needed to keep the fun separated from the math. Word count, primarily, but other things that are more functional than fun. For 2026, I was using a Sterling Ink Pocket Horizontal Common Planner. Compact, which means fewer notes pages. I actually don't need any notes pages. I only use the weekly layout.
For 2027 I ordered the Sterling Ink Core planner in the Traveler's Notebook size they call N1. It only has 23 blank pages. I was going to go with another pocket size, but I added an Inbox function to the planner so that I could keep track of things I need to do without jumping up and running to my second-brain planner. With ADHD, it's too easy to forget things if I don't write them down. This way, I can turn, add it to the inbox, and keep writing. But the Inbox took up too much space and I needed to go up a size.
Journal: I was positive I was going to use the Hobonichi A6 planner that I bought in July? August? It's a 2026 planner and my thought was I'd just re-date it and use that. The price was right and the B6 was feeling a little big this year.
I ended up buying another B6 Sterling Ink full year Common Planner in Mulberry because my other three journals are B6 and I decided that having a different size when I archived it would make me nuts. Kind of like when you buy all a series in mass market paperback and then suddenly the series is only coming out in trade paperback. Messes up the shelving. :-) Mulberry is my favorite Sterling Ink color and I will pick it every time.
Unsettled: Do I need a workout planner? This is the question. I actually bought an undated one maybe eight years ago now, but I discovered I like everything in one planner. It annoys me to have to hunt down a separate book. But I don't know. Maybe I'd like this?
The writing stuff? That's different. I transfer the information I want to hold onto from the nuts and bolts writing planner into my second brain every night. At the end of the year, that planner is tossed. The dopamine planner? I'm not keeping that either. (Although I do plan to take pictures of my crafting, no matter how bad I am at it.)
So I'm still mulling this over. I've vacillated between I absolutely want to use this planner to no chance. I'll never keep up with it. Today? It's a I don't need it day.
