How to Choose the Best Planner for your Personality Type
A good plan gets you from A to B, and a beautiful planner helps you get there in style.
While we generally prefer digital planning here at Simplish, we know that there are times when only the crisp, blank pages of a real paper planner will do your dreams and plans justice. If it gives you a clearer overview of your tasks and helps you stay organized - then we approve!
Personalizing your planning setup will encourage you to stick to your goals and keep you centered, no matter what comes your way.
In this guide, learn how to choose the best planner for your personality based on your enneagram type.
Maybe you’re incredibly detail-oriented with the data-collecting mind of an Investigator
Or maybe you’re an Enthusiast who tends to avoid planning altogether and revel in all things spontaneous
Whatever you personality, your planner should fit your life - not the other way around. Keep reading to learn how to choose the best planner for your personality type.
Best Planner for Your Personality Type
Here is our curated selection of paper planners to suit every personality type! Many of them are designed in series of thoughtful planning tools that include daily, weekly, monthly and yearly journal-style planners, along with traditional calendars and add-ons you can purchase separately, so do your research.
Planner: The Day Designer
Best for: The Idealist
As a type one, clarity and organization is an absolute priority for you. You need to have everything under control - dated, timed, and preferably color-coded. Your recipe for stress involves last minute planning, so it’s essential for you to have an overview of the most important events on your agenda on a day-by-day basis. The daily Day Designer is perfect for you! These beautiful notebooks allow you to plan thoroughly ahead, organize and prioritize your tasks, and view your agenda alongside inspiring quotes and gratitude tracker. It even comes with a self-assessment, personal values and goal-setting worksheets to help you make the most of the planner.
If you're a Helper, you're kind, caring, and possess an innate instinct to help other people out. Still, sometimes you might tend to overlook your own needs and process your emotions. So, dear Helper, you need a planner that helps you check in with your wellbeing between missions to save the day for everyone around you.
The Wellness Journal from Papier offers a space for you to do just that. Beautifully hardbound and offered in bright colors from this sunflower yellow to tropical sea blue and simple gray, the Wellness Planner includes bountiful pages for reflecting on your mindful goals, habits, meals, water intake, sleep and all of the things you’re grateful for. This planner will encourage you to note the things that make you feel good and plan time for yourself.
Planner: Daily Simplified Planner by Emily Ley
Best for: The Achiever
Goal-oriented achievers love to have everything under control. If checking a completed task off of your to-do list is the ultimate feel-good activity for you, then look no further than the Daily Simplified Planner by Emily Ley. This is one of the best planners for a type-A personality like yours because it offers an abundance of to-do lists while allowing you to carve out some white space for the good things in your life. Every day in this planner includes equal space for agenda items and to-do items to satisfy your action-oriented approach to life. The introduction pages include space for you to reflect on your routines, giving you a weekly overview in addition to lines to list your ideal morning and evening flow. The daily pages are organized neatly into weeks with a handy tab system, and color coded months so you can easily flip forward and backward through your book.
Planner: The Bullet Journal
Best for: The Individualist
Introspective and emotionally-driven, the individualist is driven to make decisions based purely on personal motivation. After all, what’s inspiring about doing things the way everyone else does? This all-or-nothing attitude can lead to inconsistency. Ultimately, though, setting pen to paper helps these free-thinkers to channel their creative energy. And a tasteful, personalized solution is of the utmost importance when Individualists choose a planner.
The Bullet Journal, a branded DIY planning method with optional add-ons, offers the kind of freedom that Individualists need to self-motivate in a streamlined, intelligent system. You can use the Bullet Journal method in any bound book, but the company sells branded journals with stickers and printed instructions as well to give you a head start.
Planner: Unbound Planner
Best for: The Investigator
If you're a type five, you probably love logic and are quite cerebral. You often approach projects by weighing every possible pro and con from a hyper-rational perspective. You are in your element accounting for every detail, which is why the Unbound Planner is a perfect fit. In these beautifully cotton-bound books, you can conveniently create action plans for your projects, lay out your everyday tasks by the hour, and keep track of your habits.
This minimalistic series of planners is designed with modular elements that work together to give you a thorough overview of your life. Bundle the weekly planner for your action items with the popular 5-year journal for recording daily observations, and choose from a wide variety of add-on worksheets in both digital and print format, including a habit tracker, project planner, budget worksheet, holiday planner, and more.
planner: Erin Condren Life Planner
Best for: The Loyalist
Responsible, hard workers, with a natural instinct for self-preservation, Loyalists are cautious planners. They love to plan ahead and always have a plan B in place to cover their bases. Loyalists need reliable tools like the Life Planner by Erin Condren to keep daily life flowing. The Life Collection planners are fully customizable, with hourly, daily, weekly vertical, and weekly horizontal layout options, along with spiral-bound, softbound, binder, and ring agenda bindings to choose from. The ring agenda shown here makes a trusty companion for the planners looking for a beautiful, bound agenda to cover all of the bases. It comes with unique productivity pages, note pages, stickers, and much more.
planner: The Happy Planner
Best for: The Enthusiast
Fun and joyful, Enthusiasts thrive on spontaneity and live for those un-plannable moments that remind you why life is worth living. For the same reasons, Enthusiasts have trouble making commitments and following up. If you want to achieve the goals that really ignite you, you need a planner that reminds you to center joy with simple, un-complicated structure. The Happy Planner is a useful monthly spread agenda that allows you to organize and plan your day while leaving white space where you can doodle, take notes, or simply download your daydreams and ideas to come back to later. The Happy Planner comes in a variety of delightful designs and patterns so you can choose whichever one suits your sparkling mood!
planner: Productivity Planner
Best for: The Challenger
Challengers are naturally gifted with charisma, grit, and motivation to do the right thing. They love being in control of everything in life and making thorough plans are an absolute must for you. For this reason, the Productivity Planner from Intelligent Change is a great option for you. Its design enhances focus on the big picture while featuring thoughtful details that make it a pleasure to use on a daily basis. Beat procrastination and enhance your productivity with a sleek design that gives you full at-a-glance overview without distracting you with unnecessary details. In addition, it also features a useful monthly calendar, extra space for notes, a daily schedule, and a habit tracker.
planner: The Badge Collection
Best for: The Peacemaker
Peacemakers are naturally creative, valuing harmony in life and in the people around them. If you are a Peacemaker, nothing fulfills you more than getting in the flow and staying in it. Making detailed plans can be difficult for Peacemakers, who understand that life happens and change their schedule to accommodate others at their own expense. The Badge Collection might be just the thing for you. This series includes a range of calendars, weekly and monthly planners, and journals that work together to help you track your own wellbeing while staying on top of commitments to others. We like that the journal offers a dedicated space for reflection, apart from the demands of your weekly agenda.
