Artists and writers have unique demands on their lives; sometimes, a traditional planner can limit or prohibit you from being as productive as possible.

This is where a printable planner comes in handy.

A simple yet powerful resource that can help you organize your days, set goals, and keep track of your progress, all while managing a busy family and pursuing your creative goals.

The beauty of a printable planner is its flexibility, allowing you to customize it to fit your unique life and responsibilities and adjust as life changes. Let’s dive into how these printable worksheets can help you bring clarity and purpose to your everyday tasks.

Flexibility and Customization

A printable planner or worksheet gives you ultimate flexibility. You can create or download free printables or buy a printable that you can print out as many times as you need to produce the best planner for you.

If you need daily sheets for one week and a weekly preview for the next, you can print them accordingly and create a completely customized planner as you move through the year.

Another benefit to a printable planner is that it can be cost-effective to buy an undated printable planner and reprint it year after year. Instead of having to buy a new dated planner each year. With the ease and flexibility of a printable planner, you can also reduce paper waste by only printing pages you are actually going to use. This is also a great benefit to saving trees.

Types of Printable Planner Worksheets

• Daily Planner sheets– These printable sheets give maximal diversity to how you can plan your daily schedule, including the time-blocking option. You can create printables with special sections for art creation and business management. You can also include sections to track your writing, pages written, and publishing stats.
• Weekly Planner Printables– Printables are geared more towards the week and allow you to see your week at a glance. They also have sections for goals, to-do lists, and special focus interests.
• Monthly Planner Printables– A helpful printable for seeing the entire month simultaneously. You can include holidays, birthdays, and special events, plan out long-term goals, including deadlines, and see where your year is headed with only twelve sheets of paper.
• Habit Trackers– With the ability to track every type of task, from reading daily to brushing your adorable dog, there is no limit to what you can improve by tracking how often you do a specific task. Considering there are several ways to use habit tracks, you also have unlimited design options to make your habit trackers encourage you to complete the task simply by the way the tracker looks.
• Budget Trackers– A printable budget tracker is helpful not only for your personal life and telling your money exactly where you want it to go each month; it can be useful for business as well. As an artist, you have a budget. No matter the size of your income, you need to know exactly where each penny is going so you can track your funds coming in and out. As your business grows, these numbers will be helpful in how you grow and in what areas you spend more money on, depending on the growth you want to experience.
• Meal Planners– As people and parents, we need to know what is for dinner. Saving money on cooking at home will help you expand your art and writing faster and allow you to eat healthier by knowing precisely what you are putting in your body. Printable meal planners are also highly flexible to different seasons of your life. If you are having a dinner party this month and need to know precisely what you are cooking, these beautiful pieces of paper help you see everything at one time.
• Goal-Setting Printables– A good goal printable helps you see the big goal and break it down into smaller pieces with action steps to reach the goal you have in mind. These also have places to track your progress with the goal and what items you might need to have to accomplish the goal.

How to Use Printable Planner
Worksheets Effectively

• A good printable will come with instructions on how to print the printable. You also need to know what setting your printer has to be able to print each sheet correctly. Example. My printer prints front to back, but it prints the last page in the file first, working backward to the first page. Your printer may not print front to back. This means you have to know how to reinsert the pages to print on the back side of each page if you are interested in saving paper and having less bulk in your binding method.
• Binding Options– Depending on the number of pages you will be printing at any given time will influence how you bind your new printables.
  • If you aren’t going to keep the printables once you have used them, then print a set of pages for the week, and when each day is done, throw the paper away.
  • Another option would be a three-ring binder. As you print the pages, hole punch them and add them to the binder where you need the pages. You can add dividers for the different sections to have daily sheets in one place and months in another, with your habit trackers and goal sheets in a different section.
  • I bind my planner every quarter with my binding machine. I invested in a binding machine in 2006 because of the work I was doing then. I still use it. However, you can take your printable planner to an office store and pay them to bind it for you. Some places even have covers they will put on the planners as well.
  • If you design a planner yourself and know that the design won’t be changing for the duration of use, then you can have it professionally printed and bound like a hardcover book. I haven’t done this because I want the ability to turn the spiral pages and lay my planner flat, only taking up a space a bit bigger than a letter-size sheet of paper.
• Paper is a big factor when using printables.
  • Copy paper has a 20 lb weight to it. When using printables with a lot of color, it is hard to use copy paper when printing front and back. The colors and pens you use will bleed through the paper, making it hard to read. This weight of paper is great if you are only using one side.
  • If you plan on printing front and back, consider a paper that is at least 24 lbs. It holds up nicely to having color on both sides of the piece of paper and still seeing what you are writing on both sides.
  • The paper I absolutely love has a weight of 32 lbs and a brightness of 98. You can buy it here. It is thick enough to print with full color and use whatever pen I want on the paper with no bleed. It is also extremely smooth when writing. My pen never “catches” on the paper.
  • I do not like cardstock for printing planners that I will use daily. Cardstock is fantastic for habit trackers. Cardstock paper has a weight of 90 lbs. This extra weight is wonderful for pages you will be handling a lot and don’t want to crease and get messed up.
  • Something to consider when picking the weight of paper you want: the heavier the paper, the thicker the planner will be. This is one of the reasons why I only print my planners a quarter at a time. I love the heavier paper, but it adds bulk.
  • Keep in mind what you are going to use when writing in your new printable planner. If you are using your standard BiC pen, the paper won’t matter much. If you are using colorful gel pens, the paper will matter. It will also affect how well your pens write. The paper can cause the drag effect when writing, making you not want to use the new planner.
  • Also markers, if you are a color lover like me, there are some amazing markers you may be tempted to use for your planner. Double check to ensure they don’t bleed through the paper before you do your whole planner thinking you will use these markers.
  • If you buy a coloring planner, test what you will use for the coloring because you could also have a bleed problem.
• Organizing your pages.
  • This step is going to be your personal preference.
  • What makes the most sense to have first in your planner? What do you want to have last?
  • A bonus to using a three-ring binder for a little while is the ability to figure out where you want all the different sections of your planner to go. You can easily pop open the binder and rearrange pages if necessary.

*For my planner, I have my daily sheets and review pages together with my monthly sheets as a new month comes up. I keep my routine and goal sheets at the front of my planner while keeping my daily tracker as a loose sheet of paper that I tuck into whatever day I’m on. By doing this, I actually mark off the habits on my sheets. When the habit tracker sheet was bound in my planner, I never used it.

Where to find printables.

• Searching Pinterest will give you a lot of options for free printables.
• Etsy is another place to find good printables, but this is a paid option. However, with this paid option, you will be able to connect with designers who can create custom printables for you.
• A quick Google search will also help you find printables.

Printables offer a wide range of possibilities for creatives to be more productive and organized. Give printables a try today and get more done, reaching your artis goals faster.

This is part of my Master Time for Artist Series. You can see where it all started by clicking here.

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Here You can download my printable Categories Planner
I’m offering with my Master Time for Artist Series
by putting in your information below.

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Today’s Task: Find a free printable you would find helpful and give it a try.

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Until next time, Happy Creating.

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