Choose Your Goal Planner

A goal planner book is meant to do more than a calendar: connect the biggest thing you want this year to the smallest thing you do today, and have you look at both every week. Both of our editions run the same system; the only real choice is whether the dates are printed in for you.

Dated or undated?

The short version: a dated planner has the weeks already printed in, ready to open and use. An undated planner leaves the dates blank, so you write in the Monday you start and a slow week never leaves a stack of blank, dated pages behind it. Neither is the "right" choice; it depends on whether you're the kind of person who starts in January and mostly keeps up, or the kind who starts when you're ready and sometimes skips a week. We walk through both, with two made-up examples, here.

How the method fits together

The planner is built as a chain, each step feeding the next, so that a vague sense of "I should do something about this year" turns into a plan you actually open every week.

It starts with a life wheel: eight areas of your life, scored honestly, so you can see at a glance which one is lagging behind the rest. From there, an ikigai page helps you notice what already makes an ordinary day feel worth it, rather than chasing someone else's idea of purpose.

Whatever comes out of those two pages becomes the one goal at the center of a 9-grid goal map: a single ambition broken into eight supporting goals and 64 small actions, so the year stops being one enormous task and becomes a set of five- to twenty-minute ones.

Each of those eight supports then gets its own goal ladder: a quarter milestone, twelve monthly mini-goals, a weekly habit and a daily action, so nothing sits written down and forgotten. From there, the plan comes down to the week: a two-page spread with a top priority for each day and, on the facing page, your big rocks, ten-minute steps and habit grid. Our suggested weekly routine walks through that page minute by minute, and shows how to pick the routine back up after a week you miss.

Every month and every quarter, the planner asks you to look back honestly at what moved and what didn't, and to choose again which ladders to push. That's what keeps the goal on the 9-grid map from becoming a page you wrote once in January and never returned to.

Which one to buy

If you like to start in January with the dates already there, choose the 2027 dated edition. If you're buying partway through the year, or you know a missed week tends to end a planner for you, choose the undated edition instead. The system inside is identical either way.