The Benefits of An Undated Planner & How To Use One

Is an undated planner right for me?

What planner will work best for you is an utterly personal choice, and will be influenced by your routines, the shape of your days and what it is you want to use the planner for, and a surprising number of you are reaching for physical, paper-based planners over a digital app or calendar. In fact, the paper planning and dot grid notebook markets are only growing, as we all look to create a sense of control in an increasingly chaotic world. Plus, the new focus on healthy living and the proactive creation of better, more visible, lifestyle choices has led to a population obsessed with the metrics of success, whether that be in quantifiable numbers of weight and earnings or more abstract goals of happiness and self-development. The world of planner hacks and paper planning obsessives is a multifaceted one, with a whole vocabulary of diary-related jargon: searches for ‘planner flip throughs’ ‘bullet journal layouts’ and ‘weekly setups’ numbering into the millions. But it is important to remember that a planner’s primary purpose is to serve you, either as a hobby or an efficiency tool, and it can be easy to pass as a false veneer of productivity. It is the doing of the things that move you closer to your goals, not the design of the plan. We all know the feeling - you start January full of hopes and plans with a shiny new planner to hand in which you'll utterly transform both yourself and your life, only for it to be sat gathering dust by sometime mid-March. But life doesn’t have to be this way! Dated diaries do not suit every lifestyle and there’s no reason for you to try and shoehorn your life into the constrictions of one. All hail the undated planner, and in this blog post we are going to show you how to use an undated planner; the benefits of using one; and why it just might replace your dated or academic planner for good.

The benefits of using an undated planner

You’d think in a world where smartphones rarely leave our sides and there’s an app for every function in life, that paper planning would have gone the way of, well, everything else that has gone extinct. Happily, for stationery lovers (addicts?) especially, the opposite is true.

• Less guilt & wasted paper with an undated planner

Let’s face it: a planner that is made to last a whole year is rarely cheap. And with the cost comes the guilt of not using it to its full potential, that is: every day. With a dated diary this is certainly the case. An unused dated section will stand out in its sheer emptiness. An undated diary, however, can be picked up and put down whenever you need it. You can skip days, weeks or even months if you want to, without the guilt of blank pages or wasted paper.

• An undated planner is more adaptable

Dated planners are usually quite prescriptive of where you write information about a set time period and as thus can be fairly restrictive if you have a lot you want to plan or record. With an undated planner or diary, you can use the space usually set aside for that time period, or overflow into other spaces without having to cross out any dates and risk losing the space the next day. Some undated planners include a traditional week layout but with added extra planning layouts so that they can offer the utmost level of customisation and adaptability. In a similar vein to academic planners, there may be blank timetables, monthly reviews, empty list sections and more note pages than are usually found in a dated diary or planner. (such as the Katie Leamon any date planners, which make use of the week-to-view page, with the week layout to the right and a dashboard-style page to the left, with an empty list just waiting to be filled in.)

• Undated planners are perfect for non-traditional schedules

For students and shift workers of all ages, especially undergraduates and postgraduates who have to create their own study and work schedule, undated planners can work so much better than academic planners for their sheer flexibility and the equal space given to the weekend days as much as the weekdays. By using an undated planner you can do away with Mid-year diaries, or any of the diaries made to cover a specific time, whether traditional or not, and make use of an undated planner as and when you need it.

How to use an undated Planner

The risk that comes with having a planner that doesn’t have built-in guilt of wasting paper, is that you could put off setting it up and using it altogether. If you want a full in-depth guide on how to set up a new planner, we’ve got a blog post all about it. Before putting pen to paper, it can help to think about what you want to get out of using this planner. Maybe make a list or mind map of what you want to track and log, if you want to use it for your personal or professional life (or a mixture of both), who you will be using it for (undated planners can make fantastic family planners, with sections for each member of the family), and whether you want to use it to also store memories or work on your goals. If you know the time period you will be using the planner for, go ahead and fill in the dates. This can be made a lot easier with a date stamp, or a lot more fun by using brush pens and calligraphy flourishes to make the page your own.

Other ways to use an undated planner

Planners are no longer just about sustaining a level of efficiency and productivity, they are also about creativity and self-care, perhaps now even more so, as we have to actively choose them over their easier-to-access technological counterparts. They cause us to slow down and consider what we want from our time - the one resource we cannot replace. Here are our favourite ways that you can use your undated planner to suit your planning needs.

• Bullet journal (a lighter version)

Bullet journaling has recently celebrated its 10th year since its inception, and it has only gotten more popular with time. It is famous for being the planner system that only requires a pen and a notebook (such as one of our beautiful hand-printed notebooks), but its complete flexibility and reliance on you setting it up yourself is the cause for a lot of people abandoning their bullet journal once time got tight or the shiny feeling of a new thing wore off. This is where an undated planner can help. You still get the wide open spaces and opportunity to create a system that works for you, but with the structure of a pre-printed planner.

• Project planning

For some people, the year passes not in months, days and weeks, but by project to project. For these people there may not be a need for a planner every day, so a dated planner would leave them with big, wide, unused spaces. As well as being a waste of paper, there will also come the guilt of somehow having failed at keeping a planner or diary. By using an undated planner you can pick up the planner only when you need it, subdividing the sections by the period the project will cover, and put it down again, guilt-free, until the next project comes up. It can also be helpful for collecting information on future projects, keeping your mind clear to focus on the one at hand.

• Non-traditional diary keeping

Planner use has come on a lot since keeping a pocket diary to note down your appointments. There are goal planning and vision boards, habit tracking and meal planning, memory keeping and gratitude logging… to name but a few of the layouts and ideas littering Pinterest and Instagram. With a dated planner you only have the space allotted to that day. With an undated planner, especially with a layout such as the one all Katie Leamon any date planners have, there’s ample space to use as you wish. We even have the ever-popular list format on the page facing the more traditional week-to-view layout - perfect for creating a rolling to-do list, meal planning section, or simply decorating with your favourite roll of washi tape. Use them to section off parts of the page, as a page marker tab by folding them over the edge of the page, or simply to make the page more pleasing to look at. Whatever type of planner you go for, dated, undated, bullet journal or academic, make sure that it suits your needs the best. Here at Katie Leamon we champion the use of stationery and analogue planning and will always provide you with the best quality, most beautiful tools to do so.