As a manager, your life is nonstop. Endless emails, meetings, projects, and people demanding your time and attention. Just thinking about your overflowing plate is exhausting.
But with the right digital planner, you can transform the chaos into clarity. A planner tailored for busy managers helps you effortlessly organize, prioritize, and schedule each day and week so you can make time for what's truly important.
The key is finding a planner that understands your role and needs. One with features that enable you to:
- Visualize and maintain a big picture overview of goals and resolutions.
- Prioritize your most critical tasks and projects so urgent issues don't crowd out important goals.
- Keep you organized and effective by planning out to-dos and delegate them to the right people (including you) on a weekly or daily basis.
- Check in and reflect regularly to keep yourself motivated and on track while balancing personal and professional commitments (or any burner that you're turning on at the time!)
With an optimized planner, you'll work smarter, not longer. Your time will align to your biggest priorities, both individual and team. You'll gain control of your calendar while empowering your team with clear direction.
In our guide, we will show you how to start your digital planner that way with free ready-to-do templates, plus many tips and tricks.
The Best Free Digital Planners
With so many options, how do you select the right digital planner as a busy manager? After researching the top digital planners on the market, we've highlighted the best choices for managers looking to optimize their productivity and time. Whether you need a basic calendar, an all-in-one task manager, or a vision board planner, there is a (free) option that meets your needs and keep your life "on track".
Read on to find the best free digital planner for you and take control of your schedule:
Todoist
Todoist is more than just a basic to-do list app. Even the free version of Todoist provides access to all the core planning and task management features needed for a digital planner. With its combination of an easy-to-use interface, flexibility, and ready-made templates, Todoist can be considered a top choice for organizing your plan and tracking to-dos at no cost.
For managers who want to get started quickly with a pre-made planner template, Todoist offers several free options to choose from. We suggest to go with the Annual Review Template to set out your top priorities, then add other pages for your habit trackers and project management.
We like this because of:
- Various pre-made templates for different contexts like work, personal, education, creative projects, and more.
- An easy way to add and manage detailed tasks with due dates and reminders.
- The ability to access our planner anytime, anywhere via mobile apps, web apps, and integration with digital calendars like Google.
Clickup
While best known as an all-in-one team project management tool, ClickUp can also double as a helpful digital planner for busy managers - and it can be completely free!
With its flexible custom views, ClickUp allows you to plan your days, weeks, or months in a variety of visual formats like calendar, timeline, Kanban board, and list. You can create tasks, reminders, recurring events, and more to organize your personal and professional goals and schedules. Besides, you might find the bold color-code tags helpful to categorize activities into different domains.
ClickUp offers templates like their free daily planner to help you get started quickly. With real-time sync across devices, ClickUp provides managers a free and fully-featured option to bring order to unwieldy schedules. The same tool you use to manage team projects can also help optimize your personal productivity.
We like this because of:
- A gallery of free templates for managing personal tasks and daily/weekly activities, but designed to fit different styles.
- Customizable views.
- The ability to access our planner on both desktop and mobile app.
2024 Notion Planner Template
For those who are likely to think outside the box, Notion provides a digital planning canvas limited only by your imagination. It lets you build daily, weekly, and monthly schedule templates from scratch and customize them down to the smallest details.
But in case you don't have time to design a whole new system, no worries! We bring here a free Notion digital planner template for organizing and tracking your goals.
Our 2024 planner comes with:
- A yearly planning page to map out your major goals and objectives for the whole year that you want to achieve.
- Monthly templates with daily and weekly views to plan and manage each day with ease.
- Monthly self-reflection and gratitude log at the end to reflect on accomplishments and progress. Keep growing!
Canva Digital Planner
Want to design a planner that fits your style perfectly? Go to Canva. With an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, you can easily personalize layouts by tweaking fonts, colors, and images to match your style. We recommend using Canva Docs for your digital planners which make inputting your details like tasks, events, and notes simple.
There are also a wide choice of daily, weekly, and monthly planner templates that you can customize and make your planner as unique as you are in minutes.
Discover More Free printable PDF Planner Templates Below:
World of Printables Planner Template
Kdigital Studio PDF Digital Planners
Passion Planner PDF Templates
Weekly and Monthly Planner Templates
Friday Digital Planner Templates
DayDesigner Free Planner Printables
My Daily Planner PDF Template with Reminders
Lots of us enjoy the zen of handwriting but still want the benefits of going digital. If that sounds like you, MyDailyPlanners is a must-try resource. Though not free, their awesome library of digital planner PDF templates allows you to schedule meetings and events in Google and Apple Calendar straight from handwritten notes.
These thoughtful templates have hyperlinks embedded in activity sections. Slowly craft your days, writing by hand on your device. Then seamlessly integrate into your online calendars. With MyDailyPlanners, you can have the tranquility of classic planning combined with the convenience of digitization.
Finding Digital Planning Nirvana
When adopting a digital planner, the most important step is choosing a format that fits your personal planning style. With the sea of options out there, it can be overwhelming to identify which works best for you. Generally, digital planners fall into three main camps: task management, reflection-oriented, or creativity-focused.
For those who want to maximize task organization, productivity apps like Todoist and ClickUp are ideal. Their specialized features for reminders, priorities, due dates, notifications, and calendars allow you to track all your to-do’s seamlessly.
For goal-oriented users who value reflection, digital journals like GoodNotes or OneNote mirror classic paper planners with daily, weekly, and monthly spreads perfect for self-growth. Customize them with trackers and inspirational elements.
Finally, for artsy folks, flexible platforms like Notion and Airtable empower you to let your creativity run wild when designing layouts, color schemes, and visual components.
The key is not getting swayed by all the options, but honestly assessing your planning personality. Are you driven by task completion and organization? Self-development through introspection? Artistic expression? Once your primary motivator is clear, find the digital planner suited to your needs. When your planner aligns with your instincts, you’ll reach a flow state of planning nirvana.
Customize Your Planner for Maximum Productivity
When adopting a new digital planner, small customizations can make it feel like your own. Simple tweaks tailored to your needs go a long way.
Here are shortcuts to customize templates for busy managers:
- Change covers and themes to reflect your priorities and motivations.
- Highlight key dates, milestones, and deadlines in bold colors.
- Resize columns for tasks, notes, appointments to fit your activities.
- Create templates for recurring meetings to auto-populate.
- Set visual cues like icons or colors to flag priorities and statuses.
- Add inspiring quotes or images to start your day motivated.
- Organize projects and client work into separate sections.
- Build your ideal daily and weekly layouts then duplicate.
Don't overthink design details. Focus customizations on what makes you most productive. Let your planner reflect your management style and priorities. With these simple adjustments, any template transforms into your ideal planning anchor.
Tips to Make Digital Planning a Habit
Planning consistently can help you live a more organized and purposeful life. Chaos can be replaced by confidence and employee productivity. Don't wait for the right moment to start. Begin today with a simple planning habit and use your digital planner to help you achieve your goals.
Here are some tips to develop a planning habit even if you’re lazy:
- Set a designated planning time - Block off 15 minutes at the same time each week to review your planner. For instance, every Sunday night from 8 - 8:15 PM. This makes planning a routine habit.
- Tie to a daily habit - Attach your planner review to an existing habit like drinking your morning coffee. While you sip, spend 5 minutes going over your day's schedule and priorities. Linking it to a consistent activity makes it easier to remember.
- Schedule it - Put your planning time on your actual calendar! This "officializes" it so you commit. Also, schedule reminders 15 minutes before so you don't forget.
- Start small - If planning out your life months ahead seems impossible, just focus on 1 week at a time. You can still capture key future dates, but only detail the current week. As the habit builds, you can gradually expand your planning horizon.
Bonus: Save your planning time with AI tools like Small Steps to create your to-do action items for your goals.
- Focus on priorities - For beginning planners, highlight just your very top 1-2 priorities for the week rather than overwhelming yourself by planning every detail. As it becomes a habit, you can increase what you plan out.
- Batch plan - For weekly planning, set aside time to batch simpler tasks like setting up your template, writing in key dates, etc. Getting the structure in place first speeds up the process.
- Reward yourself - After you finish planning, treat yourself to something small but enjoyable like a piece of chocolate, a relaxing bath, or watching your favorite show. This incentivizes sticking to it.
Bonus: Put your to-do list into Daily Quests and get a game plan for your day – including ChatGPT-suggested rewards for a job well done!
- Make it social - Coordinate planning time with an organized friend for mutual motivation and accountability. Do your own planning individually but connect afterward. Having someone else counting on you increases follow-through.
Wrapping it Up
With an abundance of amazing free digital planner templates available, there’s no need to delay - your ideal planning system is just a few clicks away. Choose a template that speaks to you, personalize it to match your style, and start mapping out your days, months, and even years.
Once you get into the habit of being organized and efficient, you'll see the difference it makes - being more focused, less stressed, and more accomplished each day. Don't put off your goals another day - create the life you want with a digital planner that turns chaos into clarity. So what are you waiting for?
