2018 Momentum Planners by Productive Flourishing

Photo: Productive Flourishing

Way back in the day, I reviewed Charlie Gilkey's Productivity Flourishing Momentum Planners. A lot has changed since then! And some things have stayed the same, specifically how awesome these printable planners are. They are now even more awesome, because now they are fillable! More on that in a sec.

The Momentum Planners aren't your typical appointment books (although they do keep track of appointments too). They are designed to get you to think about What Needs To Be Done. They start you thinking about the big picture, then they get you to narrow your actions down to what needs done on the quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily levels. This gets you to create a roadmap so you know exactly what you need to do and when you need to do it.

The Momentum Planners are available to purchase online for instant download so you can get started immediately on your road to maximum productivity. For only $12 you get the entire year of annual goals pages, quarterly goals, Monthly Action Planners, Weekly Action Planners, and Daily Action planners.

When you buy the Momentum Planners, you get not only the planners themselves but also loads of support from Charlie himself with productivity emails, how-tos, podcasts, and access to the entire Productivity Flourishing community online.

Here's how the planners work. See below for sample pages:

Product image: Productive Flourishing

You can get a quick overview of the planners with some insight into how they were designed here. Click on the links in the descriptions below for Charlie's brief tutorials on how to use each type of planner.

Start by getting an overview of your annual goals using the Annual Momentum Planner. This gets you to think about what you want to accomplish over the course of the year.

Next, break these big goals down into Quarterly goals. (The Annual and Quarterly Momentum planners are only available in the purchased planners bundle.) Then think about what you can accomplish each month.

The Monthly Momentum Planners will get you to think in more detail about what you can get done in the upcoming month, working around events and other projects.

The Weekly Momentum Planner breaks down your week and lets you see what you've got going on, when you'll have time to work, and what your main projects/ deliverables are.

The Daily Momentum Planner breaks down each day with plenty of space to write your scheduled events, projects, and tasks. The untimed daily schedule has 8 hours broken down into 15 minute increments so you can decide when you are going to work on what. You can use these 8 hours in any way throughout the day: 2 or 3 hours of productive work in the morning, another 2 in the afternoon, maybe a couple of hours in the evening to work on your side gig. Most people have about 8 hours a day of actual productive work; this setup helps you maximize that.

I won't go into too much more detail about how to use the planners.  Click the links above for lots more descriptions of the details. There's loads of advice and help on how to use them to best work for you. To get started, see Charlie's Quick Overview of the Momentum Planners.

You can get the monthly, weekly and daily planners for free each month near the end of the month on Productive Flourishing. But if you don't want to wait for them to come out each month, I recommend buying the entire year to download all at once. This has the huge advantage that you get all the planners for the entire year (with the annual and quarterly planners too) ready to use right away. There's no waiting for shipping. You get your planners and start using them immediately.

You can print each planner page out as you need it, or print them ahead of time and hole-punch them to fit in a binder. Or, you can print the pages and have them spiral-bound into monthly or quarterly books to be extra organized.

Due to popular demand, the Momentum Planners are now fillable! Now you can type in your times, tasks, events, and goals, and print them directly onto the pages. This is great for people who like to keep it neat. But a word of advice: don't be precious with your planner pages. Don't be afraid to write on them, erase, and change things up. Life comes at you fast, and your day will rarely go exactly as you planned. These planners allow you to keep up with everything in real time, record emergent tasks as they come at you, and work everything into your plan.

Another great thing about the planners being fillable is you can type up an outline or game plan for each project, then cut and paste each step into the appropriate week or day's Action planner. This will keep you on track with your timeline and your next actions built right into your planner.

I want to take a minute to personally thank Charlie for all the planning, goal-setting, and life inspiration and encouragement over the years, both directly and through his website and planners. Charlie is an all around great guy, productivity guru, entrepreneur coach, and life guide for Creative Giants. Spend some time on his website Productive Flourishing for loads of help and inspiration.

Thank you to Productive Flourishing to providing me with the entire 2018 Momentum Planners download for free as thanks for this updated review. I have purchased the planner bundles myself many times over the years and they are more than worth every penny. Really, for just one dollar a month, you get a hugely valuable product and loads of resources to help you maximize your productivity and creative output.

WeekDate 2018 planner: Only Write It Once!

WeekDate planners have a brilliant Only Write It Once format that allows you to write your weekly and monthly recurring events only once, keeping everything visible in front of you all the time. Nothing gets forgotten, you avoid double-bookings, and you don't have to write your repeating events over and over again throughout your planner!

If you are tired of constantly feeling like you are behind, or things are slipping through the cracks, this is the planner for you. WeekDate also makes a great gift for busy people!

To see more about how the Only Write It Once method works, click here.

I'm a long-time fan of WeekDate because I think this system is excellent.

Many thanks to WeekDate for providing this planner as a sample to review! All opinions are my own.

Every year there is a variety of cover options for the WeekDate planners. This year I went for the gorgeous Passion cover of course, because purple! You can see all the cover color and design options here.

The WeekDate weekly planner is slightly larger than a checkbook and very slim and light so it's easy to carry with you everywhere, so you can plan on the go and never be without your schedule.

The WeekDate planner folds out to give you plenty of space to write. You get to see two weeks of your schedule pages at once so you can easily see what is coming up!

The top section is for your monthly recurring events. For example if you have something on the first Friday of each month, or the last Thursday, this is where you write it. Color coding on the weekly schedule pages lets you easily see which week of the month you're in.

The dated pages are where you write daily specifics like appointments, tasks and one-time events.

The bottom section is where you write your weekly recurring events. You can write everything here like your weekly staff meetings, your kids' activity schedules, which day to put out the garbage vs recycling (on odd weeks vs even weeks), reminders to wash water bottles or do home chores, etc. Everything that happens on the same day each week gets written here, so you don't have to write it over and over each week. Write these in pencil so you can change them when needed.

At the left of the bottom section is where you write things that happen on the same day each month, like paying your credit card bill on the 1st or submitting monthly invoices on the 30th.

To see what you need to do each day you just look up and down that day's column to see it all at once!

There are loads of other features in this planner too. Each month there is a monthly overview page and a page for notes and goals.

Another feature I love is the Time Tracker. You bubble in each day as it passes to see your progress throughout the year. You can also use this to track days you've exercised, written pages of your novel/ thesis, No Spend Days, etc. It gives you a quick glance of the entire year.

There are also annual overview calendars of the current and next year.

The WeekDate pencils are the best, and are the most-stolen pencils in our house!

This portable and convenient planning system does a great job of simplifying scheduling and lets you stay on top of everything you have going on!

You can find WeekDate planners at WeekDate.com.

Agendio.com new website!

Agendio.com has the most customizable planners and planner insert pages I have ever seen. You get to choose absolutely everything about your planner: Which month to start, which day of the week your planner starts with (for example you could even have your weeks start on Wednesdays if you want!), customized lists, add your own events and holidays, on and on.

Agendio recently rolled out their new website, and it looks great! Scroll down the main page to get an overview of everything they have to offer, then when you are ready you can click on Menu in the top right corner to find everything you need.

Agendio also has gift e-cards now! You can purchase credit toward a customized Agendio product, and send it to anyone (via email) as a gift.  This is a wonderful way to give a customized planner as a gift while letting the recipient create their own planner to best suit their needs.

Here are some suggestions to get you started:

Start at Features and Options. You'll start at the Basics, then keep scrolling to see all the customization options. There are tons! This is a great way to start thinking about what you want to include in your planner. Keep on scrolling through all the Organizational, Design, and Content features so you can get a good idea of all the options.

Agendio has some new extra pages you can add like monthly or weekly trackers, goals pages, budget pages, etc. They also have tables that you can customize and add your own labels.

You can see how the customizer works here. Scroll through to see how you choose which type of product you want (planner, inserts, or notebook), which size, which layouts (daily, weekly, monthly), formats, customization, personalization, extra pages, etc. The Preview option lets you see what your planner will look like page by page so you can make any adjustments before you hit Purchase.

I customized a new planner, which is on its way to me and should be here in early December. I will be sure to post a full review when it arrives!

One of the new features I got in my new planner is their Personal-Year planner, which you can start any day of the year (such as your birthday). It has special pages to track goals, intentions, etc all year, monthly or weekly.  I think this would be a great way to track your goals and personal progress all year. Another great use for this type of planner would be for new parents to track their baby's growth and development all year. It would be a great way to record all those milestones and firsts!

I have created and reviewed Agendio planners and Filofax inserts before, you can click here and scroll down to see my reviews here on Plannerisms, and click here and scroll down to see my inserts reviews on Philofaxy for more information on how the customization works and to see planners I have created.

I recommend taking your time to go through all the options and see what you can do. The possibilities are endless. After you have chosen your planner format, you can do things like adjusting the line spacing wider or narrower, shading the background of specific areas of your pages, adding circle or square checkboxes (or not), choosing your fonts, colors, add tabs, on and on. You can label your list spaces, make your daily schedule start and end at the times you choose, and add your own events and holidays.



All of your information is saved year after year, so if you want to reprint your same planner it's already in there. Or if you want to create a different planner using your saved events and holidays, you can have those automatically added to your new planner. You can also have different holiday and events lists, so for example if you want to create a planner for someone else, you can have a list of their holidays and events specifically for their planner too.

Agendio has a referral program that works like this:

If you have never registered with Agendio before, please click through this link to see the information on the planner I made and register at Agendio. Then if you order a planner from Agendio, I will receive a discount on my next planner (which I will inevitably order, because customizing my own planner is very addictive!). It doesn't cost you anything at all, and I will get a discount on my next planner. Thank you!!!

I recommend Agendio planners to people all the time. If standard planners just aren't doing it for you, a customized planner just might be what you need!