Self Journal or Self Planner – Which Tool Is Right For You?

If you want to organize your time, boost your productivity, and create the life you want, working with a daily planner is essential. Without a planner, you leave too much to chance! Life is too fast, too unpredictable, and too busy! If you try and juggle it all in your head, time runs away with you - and you don’t get what you want.

But plan your day, and you can:

And most importantly, you can sit in the driver’s seat of your life and shape things the way you want.

But which daily planner should you choose? If you’re deciding between the Self Planner and the Self Journal, this article will help you figure it out.

A planner will help you plan better, work more productively, and do more of the things you love. Both the Self Journal and the Self Planner help you achieve these goals, with important differences.

Self Journal (Undated, lasts 13 weeks)

The Self Journal is perfect for people who want to maximize their time to achieve a specific goal within three months.

Built around a 13-Week Roadmap, all the planning and reflection templates are designed to maximize your focus on the goal at hand - so you can pass the finish line on time. Inside, you’ll discover tools and templates that help you:

Whether you want to write a book, launch a side hustle, lose weight, change careers, pay off debt, or start a business, the Self Journal is the right daily journal for you.

The Self Planner is designed to help you create more order, structure, and organization. Right now in your life, you’re not focused on a specific goal. instead, you want to get your life in order.

All the planning and reflection templates are designed to help you take back control, so there’s space to figure out what you want to do with your life. Inside, you’ll discover tools and templates that help you:

You’ll also discover:

6-month Bucket List - so you can capture your dreams and bring them a step closer to reality

BestSelf Benchmark - so you can score your work-life harmony and create a baseline to track progress and improvements

Project Plans - to break down complex tasks into achievable, bite-sized chunks

If your life is so chaotic you can’t keep up, then the Self Planner is for you.

Both the Self Journal and the Self Planner help you plan and prioritize your day, but the layouts in each tool are different.

The Self Journal has a double-page spread for each day. The template includes:

This daily template keeps your attention on your goal to ensure every action moves the needle in the right direction. 13 weeks is long enough to achieve something significant, but it’s also a tight time window. Daily reflection ensures you don’t stray too far by keeping you firmly focused on what’s working and what isn’t - so you can adapt fast.

The Self Planner also contains a 6am-9pm daily timeline and space for the day’s priorities, but presented in a weekly view instead of a daily spread. It’s a perfect layout for creating work-life harmony because you can see an overview of your week at a glance.

There’s still place for daily deep-dives though. Instead of a structured template, the Weekly Canvas section gives you the freedom to capture whatever you need. Use this space for gratitude, idea-generation, journaling, note-taking, sketching, mind-mapping etc. Anything goes!

Both the Self Planner and the Self Journal encourage regular reflection.

Whether you’re focused on a specific goal, or you’re creating work-life harmony, your best self needs to reflect. Without self-awareness, you can’t know what’s working and what isn’t. You also can’t know what you should do more of and where you need to scale back.

Both tools promote this essential habit but on different timescales.

The Self Journal encourages daily reflection with the ‘lessons learned’ and ‘wins’ section on the daily pages.

You’ll also find weekly reflection questions that invite you to:

This daily and weekly reflection practice keeps you sharply focused on your goal to maximize your chances of success.

There isn’t a dedicated daily section for reflection in the Self Planner - although you could use the Weekly Canvas for this purpose.

There’s no weekly reflection either. Instead, the Self Planner contains a detailed monthly reflection template that invites you to reflect on:

Success is never overnight. Instead, it’s the result of consistent daily action. This is why your habits are so critical. Your habits are your autopilot actions, behaviors, and choices. In turn, your habits shape your identity, influence your day, and determine who your best self becomes.

John C. Maxwell said, “you’ll never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.”

In short, if you want to change your life, focus on your habits.

Which is far from easy!

Humans are creatures of habit. We feel safe in what we know, which makes change difficult - even change that’s good for you. That’s why it’s so tough to instil new habits! Anytime you leave the security of your comfort zone, resistance shows up.

So how do you make it more likely that good habits will stick? The simplest way is to use a habit tracker. Habit trackers visually track your progress. Each time you complete a habit, check off your habit tracker. Before long, you’ll create a chain of wins that’s so long, it’s more painful to break the chain than to stick to your commitments.

Both the Self Planner and the Self Journal contain habit trackers - with one subtle difference.

Found on the weekly reflection pages, you can track up to five habits for seven days at a time.

Found on the monthly planner, you can track up to nine habits for 31 days at a time.

When used consistently, both the Self Journal and Self Planner will help you get results. And remember, you don’t have to stick to one or the other. Feel free to switch between the two options as your life circumstances change.

For example, after using the Self Planner for six months, you may have a clear goal in mind. If that’s the case, switch to the Self Journal to help you crush it.

Alternatively, after achieving several goals, you may be ready to review your work-life harmony as a whole. In that case, you may wish to swap from the Self Journal to the Self Planner.

The key is to use one consistently.

Don’t allow your time to go to waste. Instead, empower yourself with a tool that helps you take charge of your life, so you can show up as your best self in everything you do [whatever that means to you].