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Have you ever felt like, no matter how hard you try, you can never reach your major goals?
Are you having trouble focusing on things that really matter?
Don’t fret. At some point or another, everybody feels that way. Sometimes, there’s just too much going on with our lives that we can’t seem to focus properly. Looking at that endless to-do list can be quite exhausting and overwhelming.
One way you can fix this is to create goals for the major areas of your life and take action on them daily.
Goal-setting is based on the premise that when you are aware of your goals and how to reach them, you are able to fulfill them through actionable plans and settings.
In this article, we provide you the nine best goal-setting planners that can help you prioritize things and organize your life. But before we go to our list, let us share with you a brief explanation of the benefits of goal-setting.
Our Picks for the Best Goal Setting Planners
Don't have time to read the entire post? Then check out this table for a quick review…
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Best for High Achievers: Self Journal | CLICK HERE FOR PRICE |
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Best-Selling Weekly Planner: LifePlanner | CLICK HERE FOR PRICE |
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Small and Functional: PetitePlanner | CLICK HERE FOR PRICE |
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With Built-In Planning and Prioritization System: Full Focus Planner | CLICK HERE FOR PRICE |
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Best for Accomplishing One Main Goal: The Mastery Journal | CLICK HERE FOR PRICE |
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Endorsed by Most Psychologists: Panda Planner | CLICK HERE FOR PRICE |
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Best for Visual Planners: The Simple Elephant Planner | CLICK HERE FOR PRICE |
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Best for Work-Life Balance Goals: The Legend Planner | CLICK HERE FOR PRICE |
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Best Design: Smart Planner Pro | CLICK HERE FOR PRICE |
What are the Benefits of Goal-Setting?
It gives you a sense of purpose and destination.
No matter where you are or what you are doing, setting a goal provides you with direction. It gives you something to work hard for, and helps you know what you want in life. Consequently, that “want” becomes a life purpose, so you try hard to achieve it.
Instead of wasting time and resources doing nothing, you start to spend your time building dreams and creating plans to control your future. When you reach that goal, you enjoy a feeling of satisfaction and fulfillment.
It clears your mind and provides peace of mind.
Goal-setting helps you focus on what is truly important, and what matters most. It helps you eliminate all other things that can make you feel worried and anxious.
Through goal-setting, you achieve mental clarity and peace of mind, so that you can make wise decisions and plans. Since you are able to differentiate between what is significant and what is not, you save a lot of time and resources.
But bear in mind that you have to set the right goals to achieve this benefit. Learn the most common goal setting mistakes and how to avoid making them.
It motivates and inspires you to do better.
Positive psychology suggests that goal-setting is one way to boost motivation. When you see your goals and progress laid out in front of you, this helps you feel fulfilled and inspired. Studies show that seeing good results increases a person’s drive to continue improving and doing better.
Goal-setting is a great way to feel personal satisfaction. It helps you appreciate your skills and talents more. This, in turn, boosts your confidence and self-esteem, prompting you to do more and reach your highest potential.
It builds your relationships with other people.
When you set goals, you also set boundaries. You define your scopes and limitations. When you do that, it helps you consider the people you need help from to achieve your goals.
When you admit that you need help, you are more likely to reach out and connect with others. Reaching out and opening yourself to other people is great way to strengthen relationships.
To learn more about setting SMART goals, the video below provides a quick overview of SMART goals and then shows three examples for each of the seven areas of your life.
Now that you know the benefits of goal-setting, it’s time to check out our list of the best goal-setting planners. Let’s get to it!
9 Best Goal Setting Planner
1. Self Journal
Self Journal by BestSelf Co. is the perfect goal-setting planner for high achievers who want to reach their potential.
It is designed to prevent procrastination, imbalanced time management, and lack of discipline. Most importantly, it helps develop a sense of organization without making you feel too dazed or overwhelmed.
According to the manufacturer, the overall framework of this journal is backed by science and the psychology of success. Its contents are intended to guide you in setting plans that drive you toward your goals, while also monitoring your progress in the process.
Ultimately, it aims to help you optimize your time and use it wisely, set your tasks and priorities properly, and make your everyday goal-setting activities more productive.
The Self Journal features a 13-week planning system—just the right amount of time to accomplish a project. It is divided into three distinct sections to help you track growth on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.
Additionally, it has a habit tracker, weekly reflection section, and gratitude quotes and affirmations to keep you motivated.
Inside the daily sections, you will find a timeline where you can schedule your activities for the day. There is also a space for your specific goals and tasks, daily wins, and lessons learned. If you need a dose of inspiration, the daily section provides warm morning and evening gratitude quotes.
This is an undated planner, which means that you can start anytime. You do not need to wait until next year to start setting goals.
It also has a professional and luxurious look, which makes it more appealing and pleasing to the eyes. Its paper is made from an ivory white material that is fountain pen-friendly, smudge-proof, and stylish.
2. LifePlanner
LifePlanner is one of the bestselling weekly planners out there, an excellent choice for those who love geometric lines and kaleidoscope designs.
It comes in multiple colors (bright, neutral, or metallic), and it is customizable according to your liking and mood. To date, the LifePlanner has sold over two million copies, and 94% of its users agree that it had made their lives more organized and productive.
As mentioned, you can customize this planner in whatever way you deem fit to make your work more productive and efficient. It is designed to make your days less stressful and more meaningful.
Its format is meant to help you get things organized and achieve your goals. Your customization options include a monthly, weekly, and daily perspective, with a two-page weekly calendar view for 12 to 18 months.
This journal comes with a decorative planner storage box, gorgeous stickers, and matching kaleidoscope pens. Some of its contents include inspirational quotes, coloring spreads, inspiration boards, and additional note pages.
It also has monthly calendars, weekly planning pages, and a yearly overview. Most importantly, you get to choose between two interiors (flower power and layer) depending on your mood.
LifePlanner is made out of thick and sturdy materials. It is hand-coiled and composed of premium 80# Mohawk paper. It also has interchangeable front and back cover designs to suit your style and taste.
Overall, you have total freedom on how to design your planner, based on how you want to use it to achieve your goals.
3. PetitePlanner
PetitePlanner is a wonderful option for those who are looking for a small yet functional goal-setting planner.
Although cute and petite, it is designed to help you achieve big goals by breaking down the necessary tasks you need to accomplish first. The PetitePlanner teaches you how to take baby steps toward reaching your dreams.
The creator believes that it takes proper decision making, organizational planning, and task breaking before you can achieve your goals. Moreover, you have to repeat this process to familiarize yourself with goal-setting.
The content of the planner includes goal setting tips and advice, undated goal tracking spreads, reflection and journaling spreads, six big goal action plan spreads, to-do lists for action steps, and stickers.
If you go through the pages, you will also find prompts like goal outline, goal importance, due dates, action plans, and small steps recorder.
This journal makes a perfect planning notebook, as it is portable and lightweight. You can take it with you on the go and simply pull it out whenever inspiration strikes. With its high-quality paper, you will also surely have luxurious writing experience.
PetitePlanner is a part of a journal collection by Erin Condren. You may want to include it in your on-the-go folio with your meal planner, budget book, travel journal, gratitude journal, and other planners from Erin Condren.
4. Full Focus Planner
If you are looking for a planner that can help you have clear goals and stay focused on what matters most, then the Full Focus Planner is a must-try!
This planner is the brainchild of New York Times bestselling author Michael Hyatt and his daughter Megan Hyatt Miller. As its creators say, it aims to help people achieve more while doing less.
The Hyatts believe that one of the best ways to prioritize and organize to narrow down the things you need to accomplish. It is a matter of properly listing tasks, eliminating anything that may be impossible to achieve.
This does not mean, however, that you have to completely remove them all—you just need to do them one task at a time to make everything less overwhelming.
Full Focus Planner offers guaranteed progress as long as you follow its built-in planning and prioritization system. Even with a hectic schedule, the planner is designed to help you achieve your goals slowly yet surely. There are three styles you can choose from: classic, executive, and bold.
All three styles feature a 90-day achievement cycle, annual goal templates, and daily productivity tools. The difference lies in the color, interior design, and layout. The classic has a basic appearance, while the executive and bold are offered in various colors.
Aside from the three styles, the planner also has versions available for kids and students. Full Focus Kids is for children ages 10 to 14 years old. It is a simple planner that can teach your kids the importance of goal-setting and goal-achievement.
Full Focus Students is for high school and college students, and prepares young adults as they enter a new world by allowing them to stay ahead of growing tasks and responsibilities.
5. The Mastery Journal
We recommend The Mastery Journal to those who want to focus on accomplishing one main goal.
It was developed by John Lee Dumas, host of the award-winning podcast EOFIRE, and it focuses on three things: productivity, discipline, and focus. Most customers assert that it is a must-have if you are looking for a structured way to increase your productivity.
The heart of The Mastery Journal revolves around conducting focus sessions. In each session, you begin with one task and a timer. Upon starting the timer, your only goal is to complete that specific task you decided to do.
Do not start another one unless you are done with the first task. After four sessions, you will then go through a review and scoring process, and check how productive and disciplined you were in doing each of the tasks.
This journal teaches you to focus on one single task at a time. Instead of multitasking and creating room for distractions, you have to control yourself and avoid being side-tracked by other tasks. The journal’s designer believes that productivity is much higher when you take things one step at a time.
The Mastery Journal also features a “Win Tomorrow Today” section and a “10-Day Recap” section. In the former, you have to establish tomorrow’s routine and the one goal you need to accomplish.
This way, you will be able to get more things done. There is no need to prepare and think about everything at once, as you have already prepare the night before.
The 10-Day Recap is a simple guide that can help you evaluate your overall performance. It includes recording your wins and determining your struggles. After that, you will be able to create a plan to help you improve your process and guarantee your success.
The Mastery Journal partners with Pencils of Promise, an organization that helps people access education. For every journal sold, a portion of the proceeds goes into the educational funds of developing countries. This journal offers a wonderful way to achieve your dreams while helping others achieve theirs.
6. Panda Planner
If you are looking for a planner that can help you have confidence and take control over your life, then the Panda Planner is a suitable option.
Developed by cancer, Lyme disease, and traumatic brain injury survivor Michael Leip, this planner has all it takes to help you reclaim your happiness.
According to the manufacturer, the science behind the Panda Planner is based on the tenets of positive psychology and neuroscience. It is actually endorsed by most psychologists for its ability to make you happier and be more productive.
Whoever you are—a parent, a business professional, a teacher, a student, or an entrepreneur—this planner can help you stay focused and organized.
This planner is composed of three sections: daily, weekly, and monthly. The daily section rewires your brain and allows you to focus on the most important things.
Daily prioritization practices make productivity automatic. The weekly section helps you learn from the past seven days so you can plan your upcoming week. Lastly, the monthly section gives you an overview of your goals and helps you build better habits.
The Panda Planner targets four aspects of your life for improvement: confidence and control, organization and productivity, energy and optimism, and work/life balance.
It specifically addresses your exhaustion from the demands of modern life and trying to keep up with your day-to-day activities. As the manufacturer likes to put it, the planner aims to make your life more vibrant, and help you thrive.
This goal-setting planner comes with a set of eBooks (e.g., How to Crush Your Goals, How to Cure Procrastination), and video courses. If you want to boost your productivity and efficiency, this might be the answer.
7. The Simple Elephant Planner
We recommend this goal-setting planner for those who are fond of mind maps and vision boards. It offers a simple process to help you become more efficient, disciplined, and productive.
The Simple Elephant Planner focuses on four key areas: motivation, focus, results, and happiness. For motivation, it has mind maps and vision boards to remind you of your current progress and goals. For focus, it offers monthly and weekly sections where you can include big, actionable goals.
If you want to see your progress and results, you can look at recaps of your weeks, and see how well you managed your time and accomplished your tasks.
Through these results, you can also establish ways to improve in the future. Eventually, when you see outstanding results, you will find happiness and confidence in the things you do to achieve your goals.
The Simple Elephant Planner provides a quality planning experience to working professionals, teachers, and students. It is designed to help people focus on developing their goal-setting habits, making it an effective tool for productivity.
8. The Legend Planner
It isn’t called the “legend” for nothing—this planner can help you achieve legendary goals by incorporating organization, discipline, and productivity into your life.
The Legend Planner can help you figure out what you really want, and then assist you in creating actionable plans to accomplish it. Its framework is based on proven scientific findings on positive psychology that increase happiness and life satisfaction.
The manufacturer claims that this “legendary” planner can help you “create the life you have always wanted.” It allows you to build your personal vision and then determine your short-term and long-term goals.
Most importantly, this planner teaches you how to prioritize things on a monthly and weekly basis so you know where to focus your energy. It is basically a time-management tool that helps you commit to accomplishing tasks and meeting deadlines.
The planner features undated pages, complete with 12-months and 52-week schemes. It also offers three colorful bookmarks to help you stay on track on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. In addition, there is a habit tracker that can help you monitor everything in your life—health, work, mood, school, etc.
The Legend Planner promises to improve work-life balance and make you feel happier. It also aims to incorporate gratitude and affirmation techniques into your life.
9. Smart Planner Pro
Smart Planner Pro is another quality goal-setting planner for high achievers and those who want to practice self-development.
It features a scientific approach to achieving your highest potential while at the same time enjoying the goal-setting experience. It is a planner that can help you “plan smarter and live better.”
The designers of this journal believe that the secret to accomplishing the things you want to do is learning how to prioritize and organize things.
They also suggest that writing and listing are important parts of goal-setting, as you can see what matters most and what does not. Hence, they developed this planner to help you focus only on the things that are necessary.
This planner has a lot of features, including monthly calendars, daily schedules, weekly scoring, habit tracking, and gratitude affirmations. The monthly calendar and daily schedule can help you get a good idea of how your months and weeks will look.
The weekly scoring serves as a recap to check your progress and reflect on your wins and struggles. The habit tracker simply motivates you to continue developing your chosen habits based on the progress you see.
What is probably most interesting is the goal-setting section, which gives you four different spaces to choose from each month. This means that you will be able to see clearly what you are trying to achieve for a specific time period.
As such, you have to choose your priorities wisely—pick only what you know you can stick to.
The Smart Planner is made of luxurious, quality materials. It has 120gsm, bleed-proof paper and a silky-smooth sleek leatherette hardcover. It is a 12-month planner, complete with 52 undated weeks. It also has an inner bank pocket and three bookmarks to aid you in your progress tracking.
Final Thoughts on the Best Goal-Setting Planners
It is not enough to have dreams and goals that you want to come true—action matters, and you have to start as soon as possible. One of the best ways to kick start your journey to achieving your goals is through a goal-setting planner.
In this regard, we hope that we were able to help you choose the best goal-setting planner that suits your taste and style. The items listed above all differ in one way or another, typically in style, format, and design.
You may try one or a few of them and see for yourself which is the most appropriate for the goals you have in mind.
Did any of the planners above catch your attention? If so, we’d love hear about it in the comments!
And if you're looking for more resources to help you find the right planner, be sure to check out these articles:
- 35 Free Weekly Planner Template Printables
- 9 Best Study & Academic Planners for Students
- 10 Reasons Students Should Use a Paper Academic Year Planner
- 10 Best Planners & Organizers for Busy Moms
Finally, if you want to take your goal-setting efforts to the next level, check out this FREE printable worksheet and a step-by-step process that will help you set effective SMART goals.
