Free Yearly Planner (Fillable PDF, Word, Excel)

What is on the yearly planner

Year-at-a-glance grid

Twelve columns by 31 rows, so every day of the year has a cell. Cells are small by design: a letter, a color or two words. The point is the pattern, not the detail.

Key

A line at the top to say what the letters or colors mean. H for holiday, T for travel, D for deadline, B for birthday, P for pay day is the usual set; change it to suit.

Goals by area

Six areas of life, one goal each, with how it will be measured. A goal you cannot measure in December is not a goal yet.

Quarterly milestones

What has to be true at the end of March, June, September and December for the year's goals to land. Written in January, checked each quarter.

Month focus, key dates, money

On the month-by-month overview: one focus per month, the dates that matter, and the big bills and trips. Seeing the money column for the whole year shows which months will be tight.

Habits, stop doing, people

The three lines at the bottom of the goals page. The habits that carry the goals, the things that get in the way, and the people the year should include.

How to plan a year

Do it in one sitting between Christmas and the first week of January, or whenever your year starts. Begin with the grid: mark the public holidays, school breaks, pay days, known travel, birthdays and anniversaries, renewal dates and fixed deadlines. That takes twenty minutes with last year's calendar open and shows you the shape of the year, including the stretches with nothing in them which is where big projects go.

Then the goals page. Six areas, one goal each. Resist the urge to write three goals per area; one that gets done beats three that don't. Give each a measure you can check in December. Break the year into quarters and write what has to have happened by the end of each one. Finally, the month-by-month overview: give each month a focus that moves one of the goals forward, copy in the key dates from the grid, and write the money column honestly. The money column is the one most people skip and the one that most often decides whether the goals happen.

Three pages, three jobs

• Year at a glance is the reference page. It goes on the wall or the inside cover of the binder and gets looked at every week to see what is coming.
• Annual goals is the thinking page. Written once, reviewed each quarter when the milestone column gets filled in.
• Month by month is the bridge to the monthly planners. Each month's focus line becomes the first goal on that month's monthly planner page.

The quarterly review

The reason most yearly plans fail is that they are written in January and read in December. The milestone table fixes that with four checkpoints. At the end of each quarter, fill in the result column against the milestones, honestly, in a sentence. Then look at the next quarter's milestones and ask whether they are still the right ones. Goals change: a job changes, a baby arrives, a house sale falls through. Changing the plan on purpose is planning; letting it quietly lapse is not. The quarterly planner takes one quarter at a time in more detail.

Printing

The year-at-a-glance grid is landscape and has 372 small cells; print it on a full sheet and write with a fine pen, or type into the PDF and print it filled. It looks good enlarged to Tabloid or A3 on a copier for a wall. The goals page and the month-by-month overview are portrait and go at the front of a binder. Print all three together and you've a planning section that takes one evening a year plus ten minutes a quarter.

Editing the Word and Excel versions

In Word, the grid and tables are editable: rename the six life areas, add a row for a seventh, or switch the month order for a fiscal year that starts in April or July. The Excel grid is useful if you want to color cells by type instead of writing letters, and you can keep one sheet per year in the same workbook. There are no formulas on a yearly planner. The ODT and ODS versions open in LibreOffice and Google Docs.

Questions

Is the yearly planner dated?

No. There's a field for the year and the grid runs 1 to 31 for every month, so the same file works for any year. Days that don't exist (February 30) are simply left blank.

Does the grid show weekdays?

No, a day-of-week layout changes every year and would need re-printing. The grid is date-based: the same cell is always March 15. Use the calendar template for weekday grids.

Can I type into the PDF?

Yes. Every cell, line and tick box is a form field. Type into the grid and print it filled, or save a copy per year.

What if my year starts in April or September?

Reorder the month columns in the Word or Excel file, or simply read the grid from the April column round to March. The goals and month-by-month pages work for any twelve-month span.

How is this different from the goal planner?

The goal planner takes one goal and works out the steps. The yearly planner sets the goals for the whole year across six areas and ties them to quarters and months.