7 Reasons Why The Best Planner for 2022 is the SELF Journal!

I’ve been a planner junkie for years. Ultimately, I decided this week to return to the magic of the Self-Journal, which a friend turned me onto back when it was just a Kickstarter project. [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bestself/self-journal]

If you want to buy a Self-Journal, you can support this blog by using this affiliate link and you can get a 15% discount by using the code HeatLar at checkout!

This is not a sponsored post and the rest of the following links aren’t affiliate links.

I’ve tried the following planners over the years and they are my runners up:

• Passion Planner
• The Tapping Solution Planner
• Bullet Journaling
• Good Notes templates for iPad (which technically was still from Self Journal)
• Notion Templates
• Apple stuff: Reminders, iCal, Notes
• Rocketbook

Of all of these, the Tapping Solution Planner was a close second because I love EFT!

Here’s why I’m excited to get back into using 13-week SELF Journals again!

1. I prefer pen and paper

There, I said it. There’s nothing quite like putting all your ideas in order down on paper so you can simply flip open a notebook and see them. There’s something tangible about this that I like. (See #3 below for more on that!)

2. The SELF Journal is a proven system

In case you’re new around here, I prefer things that are backed by research. I look at everything as a constant experiment. I keep what delivers results and I dump what doesn't serve me.

From the Self Journal site:

This 13-week goal planner, backed by science and success psychology, is designed to optimize your day, tackle your goals, and live a more fulfilled life.

Gratitude and motivation are built into this planner.

It helps you beat procrastination. It helps you prioritize ideas and come up with an active schedule. You get daily and weekly pages that help you work toward a 13-week goal. I’m in the middle of a 90-day plan I set for myself, but I already feel like the SELF Journal will help me with the 9 weeks I have left to go on it.

So basically, you get a structure.

3. I Tried—and Failed—with the Digital Tools

I still love digital tools like Notion, iCal, and Apple’s Reminders app. These things hold a lot of my plans and goals! But I need to see it all in one place on paper. Good Notes was cool but had a learning curve, plus I didn’t want to spend $100 on an Apple Pencil. The cheap knockoff digital pens I ordered on Amazon didn't work. (I'm not cheap, I'm frugal). Even Notion templates had a learning curve but were easier to get into than Good Notes. Your mileage may vary.

Something is special about receiving an organized notebook full of templates that are ready to go. No learning curve, no extra purchases. Every SELF Journal I’ve ever bought also came with a mini-book on how to use it, just in case you have doubts about the system.

4. SELF Journal Makes Me More Productive. Period.

I recently found a SELF Journal I’d kept from late 2019. It was so full of ideas, plans, and accountability! It was FIRE 🔥

I’m the kind of creative who has 1,000 new ideas a day that I either need to act on or write down so I can make an action plan to accomplish them later. There are only so many hours in my creative day. SELF Journal helps me organize the ideas into the hours like nothing else.

A key thing with this planner is that the daily sheet is planned by half hours to influence you to write something for each half-hour of the day. Want a challenge? Fill in the whole thing and be accountable to yourself by every half-hour of your workday. It's harder than it sounds!

$rfsn_creative.generate('refersion_client/6708/creatives/dynamic/69849-d32841d931ffe99706b83fe3a210f7ff.json', { aid: '2658629.7d4d77' });

I’m a firm believer that creatives need parameters to do our best work and the SELF Journal provides that!

5. It’s The One Planner You Can Get the Most From

I plan to unbox mine on TikTok once it’s delivered Tuesday! Can’t wait! I recall there were always extras included in the box, but it’s been two years since I ordered one. I’m curious to see what comes in the box this time and how the planner has changed in two years. There used to be a mind-map kinda thing included along with a pen holder. (I’m hardly doing it justice).

The journal itself is enough to help you figure out if your plans are solid or not. Sometimes, it takes getting them out on paper before our eyes in a structured plan before we figure out what is lacking.

6. I’ve Been Iterating My Plan On Paper On My Own—It’s Just Not The Same

First of all, now I have a stack of loose papers. I hate that!

Second, this pile of papers and ideas isn't creating an organized plan I can easily explain to you. If I understood my plan, I could easily explain it to you. My plan is too scattered at the moment.

7. Plan An Entire Year? Please!

The scattered plan is from me looking at the entirety of 2022 at once, rather than in four small chunks. Planning the year is so much easier in quarters!

Yes, I have a full-year plan for 2022. I’m sick like that.

I also realize the work I'm doing in this 90-day portion will lead to edits for the next 90-days. This is where progress is happens!

I decided for 2022, I’ll go with a fresh SELF Journal every 13 weeks, so I set it up on autopay for a discount. That’s roughly $27 every 11 weeks billed to my card automatically. Why? Because this is a proven system backed by science.

Loved the Passion Planner one year, but it’s been years since I tried it.

I used it when I was completing my life coaching certification in 2016. As I recall, it helped me birth some great ideas for my Reiki business and baby coaching practice.

Rocketbook is My Eco-Friendly Pick

Rocketbook is great and eco-friendly because it helps you buy fewer paper products. (It's reusable "paper" with erasable ink). But you do have to have special pens to write on it. When you use the “wrong” pen and it won’t erase, I recommend nail polish remover for the stains. Rocketbook is good at customer service on Twitter, which is how I learned the nail polish trick.

I’ve also noticed I take a ton of notes, which means I need to erase frequently. The pages lose their integrity too fast for me. It also abruptly stopped sending my work notes to my Google Drive one day. Overall, it’s a great idea but it needs some work to reduce the friction for users. I still use it daily for freelancing though!

The Tapping Solution Planner

The Tapping Solution Planner (and EFT itself) got me through this past year. I didn’t use it to plan creative work. I used it to do some emotional healing work. It helped me better learn tapping and manage my anxiety. It was priceless during my covid recovery! I’ll probably still use it for my tapping practice.

Need more than just a planner to help you with your goals and plans for the new year? Book a complimentary online life coaching session with me!