Review: Premium Planners (Charlie Gilkey)

I don’t all that often post reviews straight to the blog, but I started digging into the Premium Planners earlier this week and they’ve got a lot of relevance to much of what I’ve been writing about on Aliventures: like not taking on too many goals, keeping track of your progress, staying focused and avoiding succumbing to impulses.

On a more personal note, I used them to got through some resistance on thinking about the year after April-ish – and realised that I definitely err towards packing in too much (and inevitably failing to get it all done). I’m not sure this was exactly a fun hour of realisations, but I suspect it’s going to leave me a bit more sane this autumn.

Overview

The Premium Planners are a set of pdf worksheets to help you work easily and productively, and they’re designed at three key levels of detail: annual, monthly, and weekly/daily. Charlie has produced them in three flavours: the action planners, the freelancer workweek and the blog planners.

The price

These are very good value, working out just $1/month for one set, $1.50/month for two, and a smidgen more for three:

• Action planners – $12
• Freelancer workweek – $12
• Blog planners – $12
• Two together – $18
• All three – $22

What’s included

Whichever flavour of planner you go for, you’ll get a similar set of pdfs.

• Start Here! (read this one first, it explains how the planners are packaged, printing them, etc)
• Quick Start Guide (this is a how-to on actually planning at different levels of complexity)

Each of these are one 8” x 11” page in the Action Planners and Freelancer Workweek:

• Annual planner
• Quarterly planner (Jan-Mar, Apr-Jun, Jul-Sep, Oct-Dec)
• 12 monthly planners (2010 dates)
• Weekly planner
• Daily planner (in the “Action Planners” version only)

The Blog Planners follow a slightly different structure, with a category-based planner for each month, then a single page to list all the posts for that month.

Charlie has packaged the pdfs neatly. You can:

• Print everything using the Combined planner (it’s ordered so you’ll get the Annual sheet, then a Quarterly planner, then January’s monthly planner, then four copies of the weekly planner, then February’s monthly planner, etc…)
• Open up individual pdfs, which are packaged into the four quarters, and just print the bits you need. Eg. if you’re away for a couple of weeks in August, you’ll probably only want to print two weekly planners for August.

All of this is explained in the “Start Here!” guide under “How the planners are packaged”.

Note: Charlie also currently makes some of these planners available for free (that’s why these are the “Premium” version), but you have to wait for him to post the new ones each month – you can’t get them all in one package like this. Plus you won’t get the “Annual planner”, “Quarterly planner”, the “Start Here!” and “Quick Start Guide”.

Good stuff

There is a lot of good stuff to say about the planners.

Charlie Gets Creative Productivity

Over the past few years, I’ve dipped in and out of various blogs on productivity, and I’ve found Charlie’s blog (Productive Flourishing) is one of the few ones I’ve stuck with. Not just because I find Charlie’s style extremely readable, but because he invariably makes me think. Charlie really gets productivity, especially the sort that’s involved in creative work. These planners don’t feel icky or corporate – they let me get my head around what I want to accomplish, and save me from panicking about how I’m going to fit it all in.

Ready-Made System for Planning

You may or may not have any planning going on in your life at the moment. If you’re like me, your planning system has probably evolved organically over the years. Here are a few examples of what mine’s looked like at different times:

• I used to plan out my week by hand on a sheet of lined paper as a student, with 3-4 particular tasks each day
• I had a spreadsheet split into five days and “morning” and “afternoon” in my day job
• I now keep a more detailed daily plan, with different segments for different types of task

I’ve also done annual planning in various ways, especially since starting freelancing. Each time I’ve changed my system, I’ve spent quite a while just figuring out how to best write everything down and get my head around the detailed view – particularly this year, with a lot going on.

Even if you don’t want to use every single bit of Charlie’s system, it’s a great starting point for tweaking to get something which suits you.

Tried and Tested Structure

Charlie has had versions of the Planners available freely for a while, and I’ve seen him modify and extend them due to feedback (I remember asking about some freelancer-friendly planners a while back only to be told they were in the works )

I’m sometimes wary of buying products which involve a systematic approach of some sort, in case it simply doesn’t work for me. It’s really good to know that something has been refined over time, and that it’s been tested by lots of people.

Bad stuff

There were a couple of things which, for me, didn’t fit my workflow so well. Planning is a very individual thing – your work day probably looks quite different from mine – so you may well feel differently about these!

Can’t Fill In Electronically

I like to plan on the screen: I like being able to delete and move things around, and I also like some way to enter recurring tasks. Charlie’s planners are designed to be printed. They print very nicely (I’m in the UK so my paper size is actually A4 not 8” x 11” but the pages came out just fine) but I simply prefer to work on-screen.

However, I can see that for many people, printing and writing in by hand might be preferable: it’s a good way to ensure that your planning is done in a physical and mental space where you’re not  tied up with emails, Twitter, etc…

Daily Level Complexity

The Action Planners reach down to a daily level of complexity – with a whole page for each day – and for me, this is way too much! In fairness, though, Charlie explains in the “Quick Start Guide” that no individual is going to want to use every single bit of the planners, and that realising this is a good thing: you’re becoming aware of your own processes.

I can definitely see the advantage of this level for people with work that involves quite a lot of smallish tasks, and I might well have used them in my old day job.

Blog Post Planners Every-Day Structure

Charlie’s aimed the blog post planners at, probably, the majority of bloggers – who are following advice to write every day. I don’t write a post every day, as you may have noticed! Normally, I produce 1-2 posts per week. I’d have appreciated a more flexible system, perhaps which allowed me to print multiple pages for each month, and with space to include some notes (beyond the title) for each post.

However, I do realise that most bloggers (especially, perhaps, those in need of a planner!) are working on something much closer to a daily schedule.

Verdict

So, should you get the planners? If you’ve got a reasonable amount of control over your workday, whether you’re an employee or a freelancer, I’d say an emphatic “get your hands on these!” Frankly, for $18 for everything, these are great value. If you manage to get one extra task done every week, isn’t that worth $1.50/month? And if you successfully map out your year using these and manage to get several meaningful projects completed, what value would you place on that?

If you’re in the sort of work where you either can’t plan (e.g. customer support where you’re answering the phone and emails all day) or where your schedule is very pre-determined by your boss or line manager, these aren’t for you – unless you’ve got a side business or personal projects where you want to use them.

You can find out more about the planners – and download free samples from January 2010 – on the Premium Planners page on Charlie’s blog. I’d recommend buying the $22 package of all three sets: you can mix and match bits of them, and you may find that different methods suit you at different levels of detail. If you’re not a blogger, just get the two other sets, obviously!

Note: I’m a proud affiliate for Charlie’s Planners – that means if you buy through the links on this page, I’ll get some commission. I loved the planners, and I’d recommend them whether or not I got a dime from it, but extra cash means I can spend more time writing posts for Aliventures. Yay!