DIY Weekly Planner

I furrowed my brow in concentration. I was deep in thought -- an altered state of consciousness. My eyes focused with peak precision. My hands steadied adroitly, with the masterful dexterity of a surgeon. I sat at the computer, Writer open, ready to put my mind to paper.

I am going to write that English paper.

Tomorrow. After I make this sweet-ass planner.

Putting off Procrastination

I am a terrible procrastinator, and I'm sick and tired of it! I thus constantly devise new strategies to manage my time more effectively... Of course, while procrastinating something else I have to do. It's not a matter of attention, concentration, or being distracted. It's about being interested. And that Saturday, I was interested in making a planner. Within a few minutes of this idea popping up in my head, I had already started working on my very own DIY weekly planner. Several dedicated hours of hard work later, I had my first planner since I withdrew from high school. How did I do it? I'm hungry and I have to take a shower. I'll show you later.

Just five more minutes...

Planning Your Planner

As I began planning my planner, I started thinking of resources I had available to make a higher quality product. If I didn't have too many resources, no matter! I will be quite satisfied with a crappy planner. As it turned out, I had enough to make a quality, durable planner. You may need:

• Laminator
• Laminator sheets
• Printer
• Printer paper
• Guillotine paper trimmer
• Page protectors
• Pen or pencil
• Inch ruler
• Scissors
• Tape
• Glue
• The ability to manipulate physical objects

Don't forget! You will also need ink for your printer, electricity for your appliances, food for your pantry, and a roof over your head. These are important requisites before investing several hours into making your DIY planner.

With my available resources in mind, I designed my planner. What size page? What size margins? How many weeks per page? How many days per page? What day of the week should I start on? Lines or no lines? Where should I put the day of the month? The day of the week? The month? The year? Why not have a cover? Let's have sleeves on the inside of the cover, to slip in the outer pages of the inner booklet, so I can change out the pages when I'm done with the year. That'd be cool. At this point, thought of cool things I could do with my planner design. I didn't yet care about how to make it.

Designate your design

As you can see, I just took a sheet of 8.5x11 printer paper, folded it in half (hamburger, not hotdog), and drafted my ideas onto it. I measured out half-inch margins and folded those off to get a visual of the size. I liked it, so I decided to keep it; my booklet will be 5x7.5 inches -- travel size, but not pocket size. The folded away areas I would cut off on the final product.

Next, I measured out half-inch margins to provide some spatial cushioning between the contents and the edge. I'm cooler than certain groups of people. I decided on having the month and year displayed in a band across the top of the page, so I measured another half-inch box down from the top margin. That left me 4x6 inches of space to fill with the days.

I know I wanted a weekly planner, but how should I display each day of the week? I decided on spread of one-week over across the left and right page. But how should I divide 6 inches of vertical space? Into three days, combining Saturday and Sunday on the last day space, right? No! That's racist. Weekends are just as important as weekdays. So they must have equal space -- dividing the 6 inches into four 1.5 inch portions. But what to do with the eight space? Nothing. Who cares? Non-existent days of the week don't have rights. What day to start the week? Sunday, of course. Sunday holds that position. On calendars that segregate the weekends, Mondays are merely imposters. They are unfit to start the week.

Each day space I divided into two functional areas: the left side indicating the day of the month and the day of the week, and the right side for actually writing stuff. The left side will henceforth be known as the "date box" and the right side will be the "note box". All the extra markings on my handwritten draft show that I tried a few different things to get exactly the design I wanted. I tested the design with and without horizontal and vertical lines, for example. I decided on horizontal without the vertical separator.

Now that I've got my design worked out, it's time to digitize it!


Typing your Prototype

Fire up your word processor (I used LibreOffice Writer) and make a digital version of your draft to print out!

Computerize on the computer

Now we're ready to actually make the planner!

Wait a minute, how did I do that? It's actually very simple and easy to figure out. I inserted a table the size of the page after I oriented the page as landscape and set the margins to a half-inch (recall the folded margins of my draft). You can see faded numbering on the side of my draft. I was counting how many rows and columns my table needs to be. I turns out to be 7x7. Afterwards, I edited each row to set its height to what it's supposed to be:

1. 0.5 inch top margin
2. 0.5 inch month/year banner
3. 1.5 inch day space
4. 1.5 inch day space
5. 1.5 inch day space
6. 1.5 inch day space
7. 0.5 inch bottom margin

Total: 7.5 inches

I encountered a peculiar problem at this point: my table spilled into the next page, ruining everything. If you encounter the same problem, not to worry. Just reduce the height of the first row to 0.49 inches. This fixes the problem without sacrificing anything important, unless you're a perfectionist. If you are, you should give up on this project right now, go to the store, and buy a planner.

Editing the columns:

1. 0.5 inch leftmost margin
2. 1.0 inch date box
3. 3.0 inch note box
4. 1.0 inch combined inner right/left margins
5. 1.0 inch date box
6. 3.0 inch note box
7. 0.5 inch rightmost margin

Total: 10 inches

The result should look like this:

Pictured: Table

Now for the tricky part. This grid designates all the major areas, but it must be dissected further to dedicate space to the month versus the year in the banner, the day of the month versus the day of the week in the date box, and the lines for the note box.

Merge the two cells of the banner and split it vertically again.. Repeat for the right side. This gives the month and the year separate spaces, allowing you to left-align the month and right-align the year as I did.

Next, split all the day spaces horizontally into thirds, leaving the eighth one alone. Each sub-row will be half an inch. Then, split all the split note boxes into halves. This will provide six quarter-inch lines of writing space per day.

For each date box, split the top cell vertically into two. The left half-inch box will be for the day of the month; the right one will be for the day of the week.

The result of these operations should look like this:

Pictured: Cells dividing

It's refreshing to be rewarded with the fun part after the hard part. Now we get to put in the text. If you're like me and prefer to have everything vertically centered, now is the time to do it; select the whole table and apply the vertical center.

Start with the month. Try out different fonts and sizes. I used the font Akzidenz-Grotesk BQ Condensed for all the text, using size 36 for the month, year, and day of the month. You may have to adjust the table's spacing to contents to get larger font sizes to fit in the box. I also added a space before the month and after the year so it didn't overlap with the border. For the day of the week, I used size 18.

I must admit to something here. I lied. Splitting cells wasn't the tricky part. Dissolving the borders is. This was the most frustrating part for me. I had to mess around with the cell/table properties to get what I wanted. I kept the outermost border because it defines the margins to cut off when I print this baby out.

Once again, the print-ready version. Lazy? Download it here.

If you're wondering why it goes from October 20th to January 4th in one sheet, it's because I needed to order the pages in a particular way to accommodate my binding method. That's for the next section! But wait, there's more!

Clover Plague

This time I used quarter-inch margins, because I want my cover page slightly bigger than my booklet. Once again I used some table magic to position the text where I want them. I want to incorporate my alias, my name, and a symbol into a minimalistic design. Just as Froomens is the title of my blog, Froomens should be the title of my planner, so it is prominently displayed on the cover. I thought it natural to put the other stuff on the back, with my name near the bottom. I used a vectorized version of the tangram rabbit photo I sometimes use on social media. Finished with the design, I printed it out -- on the thickest paper I had available. It's the cover after all. On the back of this sheet, I used some more table magic to print a single line through the middle to help with folding later on.

By now I am bursting with excitement. I am so close to having a planner! All I need to do now is build it.


Building your Build

Back to the real world, I decided on having a folded stack of sheets bound by staples through the middle. Like most planners, my planner will sleeves for the outermost pages so that the booklet will be secure in the cover. Since the cover will be laminated, I fired up my laminator and began cutting off the margins of my printouts while waiting for the laminator to heat up.

I didn't have a long enough stapler to staple the middle, so I sacrificed neatness and folded one side to make it shorter.

That's what I would have said if I paid attention in school. Luckily, I didn't, so I had a better solution. I just stapled my booklet from the outside to a bulletin board, pulled it out, and manually folded staples to secure it.

My booklet is done and the laminator is prepped; now it's time to finish the cover. I laminated the cover, then folded it along the line I printed on the back. Doing it the other way around may make for an ugly lamination. At this point, I found that one fold wasn't enough -- it flexed back only to a 90 degree angle. I decided to scrap the whole project and cry myself to sleep. But then I remembered I could just make another fold right next to the first one to complete the book fold. I trimmed the excess plastic from the lamination to suit my needs and turned my attention to making the sleeves.

I improvised the sleeves with the edges of a couple page protectors. I made sure they were bigger than the booklet pages, with enough space left over to glue the sides shut. My two sleeves looked really shabby so I used tape to secure it to the planner so it would be easier to reverse if it didn't work out or if I wanted to upgrade it.

Now that every piece was finished, I slid the booklet into the sleeves and I had my very own DIY weekly planner!

Conclusion

This little weekend project was a fun distraction and the result was surprisingly good. Finally I will be able to organize my daily tasks with ease, helping me build effective time management skills. I will be efficient and productive. All the things I want to do, I will be able to do. I'll get them done. I have the means. I have the tools. I am ready. I am motivated. Let's do this.

Note: I procrastinated this article for a week