I have my own unique daily planner layout that I created based on mashing up a few other bullet journal designs I found.  I like it because it’s a little “fancy,” but overall pretty simple, so it doesn’t take long to draw.  (I bought a custom rubber stamp to stamp the row of numbers, which makes it even quicker — that’s what you see above.)  Once I decided I liked it, I actually designed the whole thing as a printable.

Like it?  Buy the printable as 5.5×8.5″ for comb-binding or hole-punching (pictured above) or 5×7″ for trimming and binding into a booklet.

I want to take a few minutes to talk through the various elements of the page and how I use them, especially for those who are buying the blanks, but also as a general idea for anyone reading along, since it can be helpful to see what other people do!

The Basic Daily Layout

At its most basic, the layout actually looks like this.  (This one has some extra space because this is a screenshot of the version designed to trim to 10×7″.)

The Hourly Number Strip

This number strip is deceptively versatile.  What you’re looking at is the hours of the day.

The primary way I use this is to put a triangle around any time I have an appointment.  This corresponds to a notation farther down the page, which I’ll show a little later.  But that isn’t all you can do with it.

If you want to know how much sleep you’re getting, you can mark the time(s) you get up and go to bed, either by circling the numbers, or putting a bar there, or marking through the hours you’re sleeping, or whatever you might prefer.

I’ve used this on occasion for other things, as well.  For instance, when I had a newborn, I kept track of how often I nursed the baby by drawing small arrows above the strip pointing to each feed.  That way my sleep-deprived self knew how frequently and how recently she’d eaten.

The Date

The flag area is intended for the date.  As you can see in the example above, I Write the numerical date inside the flag itself.  I write the three-letter abbreviation for the month in block letters along the left side.  And I write the three-letter abbreviation for the day of the week to the write in a slightly elongated block lettering.

If it’s a holiday or something, you can indicate this below the day-of-the-week marking, with a doodle, a sticker, a note, etc.

If you want to get a little fancier, you can add a lot of color to this page pretty simply, by coloring the flag or adding a sticker to it before Writing the date.  (These stickers will be available in my shop when I figure out the logistics for selling them.)

Daily Notations

I’ve opted to use each 1/4″ block as two rows, just because it takes up less space that way.  That requires a pretty fine pen.  If you don’t need the space, you can write your list twice as tall.

I use three main notations, all of which you can see here.  Squares are for to-do’s.  Triangles are for appointments.  Each of these is colored in when it’s completed.  If I move something forward, I put an arrow through it instead, as you see above.

If there’s just plain information I want to make note of, I leave a dot.

Shorthand

The example page above is actually completely fabricated, and I spelled out my daughter’s nickname so it makes more sense to a reader, but I have some personal shorthand, and my kids’ names are among my abbreviations.

All of my kids’ names start with different letters, except that we have an S and an Sh.  So to save space (and time/hassle), when I’m writing about one of the kids, I often just use their first initial (or Sh for Shoshannah).  Other frequent abbreviations include:

• NB – notebook
• BS – brainstorm or Baby Steps (depending on context)
• T2H – Titus 2 Homemaker
• NHH – Naturally, Holistically Healthy
• KW – keywords

Obviously, most of these won’t be useful to someone else, but hopefully they give you a bit of an idea of how you can maintain readability but save yourself time.  If there’s something you find yourself writing out regularly — especially if it’s very long — see if it would make sense as an abbreviation.

Stickers

Certain Stickers are intended to make repeated record-keeping simple — with aesthetics as a bonus.  In some of my examples, I have actual stickers stuck on the pages; in others, I’m using printed versions that have the “stickers” incorporated right into the printed pages.  There are three in particular that I use regularly on daily pages.

Bible Reading

Ths is probably pretty self-explanatory.  Here I just jot down whatever passage I read in a given day.

Water Consumption

This one is probably also fairly self-explanatory.  Eight water droplets represent eight glasses of water.  You can color them in, make a checkmark — whatever works for you.  I don’t actually always use all eight, because I tend to count a “glass” of water as one of our actual glasses, not an 8-oz glass.  As long as you know what it means, it really doesn’t matter.

Brewer Diet

The Brewer diet is basically an eating plan designed to make it fairly simple for pregnant moms to ensure they’re getting a well-balanced whole food diet each day.

I like the simplicity of it for ensuring well-roundedness, and I struggle with maintaining weight, so I often use these even when I’m not pregnant.  If you want these trackers, I have them on my other blog for printing on regular address labels.  (Or you can print them built right into my daily pages.)

(By the way, the color on these is not coming through very clearly.  The Bible reading stickers are brown; the water stickers are teal.)

What I Use for Writing on These

Obviously, you can use whatever you prefer for writing; I’m not about to micro-manage someone’s writing utensils!  But I do personally have some favorites, and just in case you were wondering what I use…my typical daily page uses two different types of pens: Papermate Flair and Pilot G-2 (in this case, .038, although I use .7 or 1.0 in other contexts).

I do also have Papermate Flairs in other colors, that I use when I want to have fun and add some color.  (My favorite colors roughly coordinate with the colored flag stickers I made — like the purple one farther up this post — and with my bright tweed household notebook divider inserts.)