The Essentialism Planner
Reviewing A New Tool for Daily, Weekly, and Quarterly Reflection
Read time: 3.5 minutes (courtesy of thereadtime.com)
tldr: The Essential Planner is a worthwhile tool to experiment with. It offers helpful reminders to stay focused on a few important things, enroll others in your effort, and actively divest from low-impact distractions.
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Hi Timeless Leaders,
I’m getting back to a 2pm Tuesdays publication schedule. ⌚️😁
Are you applying more rigor to your calendar in 2025?
It feels good, right?
I’m internalizing a lesson from writing all last year: publishing 1 short piece on schedule > breaking the streak to produce one long piece at a random time.
In this week’s short post, I’m sharing a new tool I’m experimenting with: Greg McKeown’s The Essentialism Planner*.
I’ve tested out lots of different structured journals and morning page routines over the years. Each time I learn something new, and typically I’ll return to a blank notebook at the end, incorporating the lesson into a fresh, personalized routine.
8 days into using this planner, below are my key take-aways.
Let’s go! 🚀
Cool Things
Daily Reminders
This might be the most obvious benefit. If you do morning pages - even 2-3 minutes of reminding yourself, and writing by hand what really matters that day - you’re more likely to get it done.
Having a journal that provides the scaffolding for that routine is great.
A focus in “Divestment”
Both in the first section (called “The Personal Quarterly Offsite”) and in Weekly Reflection pages, McKeown guides you to identify areas where you spent too much time. Of course, you can’t invest in the things that matter if your time is all tied up elsewhere!
Having the forced reflection on what to say NO to is equally valuable to what deserved an obsessive YES!
Stakeholder Alignment
In the Quarterly Offsite section, the last reflection is called “Execute: How Can This be Easy?” Unlike most other personal planners, this section is dedicated to other people, what their interests are, and how to align with them.
This section helps orient daily planning and priorities to the act of leadership. You come to realize your personal goals really are intertwined with others, and your success depends on how well you bring them along. This journal reminds you of that, and helps you plan for it!
Less Cool Things
Two drawbacks of this planner are common with all analog, templatized planners. The third is specific to The Essentialism Planner.
Analog / Digital Gap
There’s just no solution to this. If you’re writing by hand in a physical book, you have to duplicate work to get your calendar and task / project management software aligned.
That said, I think this duplication is worth it - the reinforcing exercise of what you write down twice makes you that much more committed to your decisions.
Wasted Space & Missing Features
Every notebook designer makes decisions on what to include and what to leave out. They also decide how much space to allocate. Ultimately, every user is going to find some areas are a waste of paper - while other sections lack sufficient space. There might even be activities you’d like to do that are surprisingly missing!
This is simply the compromise you make when you pick up one of these planners. For me, it means I’m actually walking around with TWO notebooks now. This lets me do my free-form brainstorm and note-taking in my Moleskin while following the prescribed exercises here.
Rigid Spine
This is a flaw that probably is a function of being a first edition.
Any book you are writing in should be able to lay almost flat so you can use the full width of the page. Other journals have worked this out, but here you can see the limited user testing this publication went through (or the disregard of some user feedback… maybe they didn’t think it was essential? 🤷♂️)
Conclusion
If you’re interested in testing out a new journal routine this year, The Essentialism Planner could be worth checking out.
It will help you maintain a simple daily habit, and will give you some useful reflections to align yourself and your stakeholders with “essential” actions.
You may not choose to stick with it after 90 days… but some of the habits and insights you gain likely will.
What do you think? Are you a morning pages kind of person?
I’d also love to know:
What’s essential for you to focus on in 2025? What non-essential things are you letting go of?
See you next week,
-Joe
*Affiliate links above support your local bookstores, and yours truly.
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