WHY THE UNIQUE PLANNER

How I Created The Ultimate Print Planner for Creative Professionals

By Phil Cooke

In the digital realm, I’m an early adopter. I jumped on computers, apps, mobile devices, and more – very often while they were still in the testing phase. But frankly, after all these years online, I began to yearn for parts of the analog world. I travel a lot and grew weary of needing a power plant to re-charge all my digital devices every night. Plus, there are times when simply using paper is faster, easier and yes – actually more productive. So because I work in a creative profession, I dug out all my print notebooks from the pre-digital days. To my surprise, as I flipped through those handwritten journals, I was shocked at the ideas, plans and insight from my early years. Perhaps even more, it was easy and actually exciting to read. I had notes, drawings, crude sketches, diagrams – all the things that are much more difficult to do quickly on a digital device. Like I had been bitten by a zombie, I knew at that moment I had been turned. Certainly I’ll continue to write books on my laptop, read and check email on my iPad or phone, and use our team calendar online, but when it comes to my daily planning, ideas, sketches and priorities – I became a convert to a print planner. But there was a problem. I went online to search for planners and I was flooded with options. There are print planners for almost everything these days – students, parents, teachers, executives and more – and there’s an endless array of colors, templates, lists, bindings, and options. So I started ordering different planners to research, and here’s what I found. There are generally two extremes when it comes to productivity planners:

1. Planners with blank pages. These are planners that give you the most freedom (if you want it.) They have no templates and rely on the user to design to-do lists, templates, priorities, or sections for your daily schedule. The Bullet Journal is a good example. Nothing but grid pages filled with dots that you can fill in or design any way you like. The problem for me is that I’m busy! I don’t have time to get out a ruler, different color markers and design every single page every single day. So the blank planners were out because I have creative work to do!
2. Planners with too many templates. This includes an enormous number of productivity planners that feel way too OCD for me. For instance, you have to regularly fill out pages of questions like “What’s the magical moment you experienced today?” Seriously? Or “My Daily Affirmation” or “How do you want to spend your mealtimes?” or “How do you plan to relax this weekend?” I’m not kidding, you have to fill this stuff out on a daily and weekly basis. These journals literally exhausted me.

Truthfully, I’m sure there are people who love either of these options, and maybe if you’re launching a career or need to spend time evaluating your every moment then fine – get one of these massive collections of templates. But I’m creative, so I want a notebook that will help me plan, but also give me the freedom to create. And since I’m a professional, with clients and projects waiting, I don’t have the time to constantly design pages or spend the first hour of every day answering motivational questions. That’s when I started working on a streamlined, balanced, and productive planner for creative professionals, and it wasn’t long before we created “Unique: The Ultimate Planner for Creative Professionals.” Unique has only the most important templates so you don’t have to start from scratch:

• Your Top 3 Daily Priorities. (In my experience, an endless to-do list never gets acted on, so I pull the most important 3 tasks I have to do today and highlight them.
• A Personal List. There are always a few personal things I need to do: buy a new shaver, order movie tickets, or meet my wife for dinner. I put that on the list because we far too often forget our personal priorities when we’re at work.
• Key Calendar Events – Most creative professionals and leaders use online team calendars like Google, so we don’t need a full notebook calendar. But I’ve discovered that noting my key events for today helps keep those things at the top of my mind.
• Other Tasks – At the bottom of the page there’s an optional section for “Other Tasks” – things that come up during the day or additional tasks of importance that I can tackle once my 3 priorities are finished.
• A Notes Page – This page is blank with a dot-grid pattern. It offers me a full page for each day’s ideas, sketches, musings, and other notes.

That’s it! No extensive weekly or monthly reviews, no evaluating your “magical moments” or writing down your weekend menu. Just a simple, streamlined tool to help you maximize your day and free you up for creative thinking. And because of the streamlined design, the notebook is capable of six months of daily planning! By the way – there’s also a space for each day’s date, but you can fill that in so pages aren’t wasted. Even better, there’s an index in the back so you can make note of important page numbers to quickly find later. Also, at the very front, there are pages for you to list “Big Goals” and the “Next Steps” to get there, as well as a list for “Habits to Develop.” But that’s it – all at the front to inspire you toward the big picture, not added every day or week to bog you down. Plus, we’ve included a powerful quote each day to inspire your creativity! All in a compact 8 ½” by 5 ½” notebook that can easily be carried in a backpack, shoulder bag, briefcase or purse. We’ll continue to tweak “Unique: The Ultimate Planner for Creative Professionals” and I’d encourage you to give us your ideas and suggestions. Most important, try it out for yourself. If you’re a designer, writer, musician, media producer or creative in whatever field you’ve chosen, “Unique” will help keep you on track while releasing you to do things you’ve never dreamed about. Because creativity can’t be forced, it can only be unleashed.

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