Franklin Planner Templates

Six free printable daily planner pages, for a ring binder or a clipboard. What separates a planner page from a to-do list is that it makes you rank the day before you start it — and the ranking, not the layout, is where the benefit lives.

• Pages6 designs
• FormatEditable Office files
• Print forBinders or loose sheets
• CostFree, no signup

What a daily planner page is for

A loose-leaf daily planner is a page per day in a ring binder, with three zones that do different jobs: a prioritised task list, a time-blocked column for appointments, and space for notes taken during the day. Pages are added and removed, completed days are archived, and reference material lives behind tabs at the back.

The format dates from the paper planner systems that became popular in the 1980s — the best known, the Franklin Planner, was introduced in 1984 — and it has outlasted a great many digital replacements for one reason: the act of writing out and ranking a day is itself the planning. An app that sorts your tasks for you removes the only part of the exercise that was doing any work.

This page is for the generic version of that format. The templates below are ordinary Office documents you can edit, resize and print, with no proprietary layouts.

The templates

Six layouts to edit and print. Each download is a zip file — extract it before opening, and print one on plain paper to check it fits your binder before running off a month.

Prioritising properly, in two passes

Almost everyone writes the list and then works down it in the order it was written, which is the order things occurred to you — not an order of any value. The long-established fix is two passes, and it takes about ninety seconds.

1. First pass: letter every item A, B or C

   A is something with a real consequence if it does not happen today. B is something that should happen but can slip. C is everything you would like to do. Be honest about this: if more than three or four things are A, none of them are, and you are describing an anxiety rather than a day.

2. Second pass: number within each letter

   A1, A2, A3, then B1, B2, and so on. The numbering is what makes the list usable, because it answers the only question that matters at nine in the morning: what am I doing first? A lettered list without numbers still leaves you choosing.

3. Then start at A1 and do not skip

   The discipline is doing A1 before B1, even when B1 is easier and more appealing — which it usually is, because that is why it is a B. Most unproductive days are days spent entirely in the Bs.

4. Mark each item as it resolves

   Use distinct marks rather than one tick: done, delegated, in progress, and moved to another day. A page where every unfinished item looks the same tells you nothing afterwards, and the afterwards is where the useful information is.

If you would rather work from a plain list without the ranking, a daily to-do list is the simpler document, and a task list suits work that runs across days rather than within one.

What to do with a task that keeps moving

The genuine advantage of paper is that you can see a task migrating. When you copy an item onto a fresh page for the fourth consecutive day, the page is telling you something the task itself is not.

There are only four honest responses, and “move it again” is not among them:

• It is too big. “Sort out the website” is a project pretending to be a task. Break off the next concrete action and write that instead — something you could start in the next ten minutes.
• It is not actually yours. Delegate it, or accept that it needs someone else before you can move it, and record who you are waiting on rather than carrying it as your own.
• It is not an A. You have been lettering it optimistically. Demote it honestly and stop the daily guilt.
• It is not going to happen. Cross it out. A deliberately abandoned task costs nothing; one that migrates for three months costs a little attention every single morning.

Mark migrations with an arrow and a count, so the fourth move is visible as a fourth move. This one habit does more for a planner than any layout.

Printing to fit a binder

The reason most people give up on printed planner pages is that the first attempt does not fit the binder they already own.

• Measure the page you are replacing, not the binder. Pull out an existing sheet and measure it, including the hole positions and their distance from the edge.
• Common loose-leaf planner sizes run roughly: pocket at around 3½ by 6 inches, compact at about 4¼ by 6¾, classic at 5½ by 8½, and full letter at 8½ by 11. Classic is half a letter sheet, which is why it is the easiest to print.
• Two pages to a sheet, then cut. For classic size, lay two days side by side on a letter sheet, print double-sided, and trim down the middle. A craft guillotine gives a straight edge; scissors do not, and it shows after a week in a binder.
• Print at 100%, with scaling off. “Fit to page” is what makes carefully measured margins land in the wrong place.
• Punch after trimming, not before, and use the old page as a template for hole positions — hold them together and mark through. Adjustable punches exist for the common multi-hole patterns.
• Leave a wider inside margin than feels necessary. Rings eat about a centimetre of usable width, and text that disappears into the binding is the commonest fault in a home-printed page.
• Print a fortnight, not a year. You will want to change the layout after two weeks of real use, and everybody does.

The weekly pass that makes the daily pages work

A daily page handles today well and has no opinion about the month. Without something above it, a planner becomes a reactive log — which is the state most abandoned planners are in.

Fifteen minutes once a week, at the same time, is enough:

• Read back over the week’s pages. What actually got done, what migrated, what you spent the week on as opposed to what you intended to.
• Look forward at fixed commitments and block the time the important work will need, before the week fills with other people’s requests. A weekly calendar sits well alongside the daily pages for this.
• Pick a small number of outcomes for the week, and let those decide what gets an A on each day. This is the step that connects a planner to anything longer-term.
• Clear the inbox of the planner itself — the notes pages, the scraps, the things written down mid-call. Anything that is a task becomes one; anything that is reference goes behind a tab; the rest is thrown away.

For the layer above that again — what you are actually working towards over months — a personal development plan is a better fit than a planner page, and an action plan is the right document for a single goal with several steps and dates.

Common questions