269 4 Top Planning Tools for 2025
This week, I’m diving into the planning tools that will set you up for success in 2025. Specially, I’m highlighting the two or three tools I believe everyone needs to master their time management and keep things simple. Whether you’re managing only your schedule or balancing family calendars, I’ll help you figure out what works best for you—and let you in on my personal favorites that I use every single day.
Key Takeaways:
- How Many Tools Do You Really Need?
I’ll help you figure out if two or three planning tools are right for you, depending on where you are in life and what you’re juggling. - The Essential Planner for Weekly & Monthly Organization
Let’s talk about the go-to tool for managing your weekly and monthly schedules—the one that keeps you on track with your daily life. I’ll share my personal favorites and why these choices make a difference. - Making Family Planning Easier
If you’re coordinating schedules with family, you’ll want to know about this tool that’s been a lifesaver for us at home. Spoiler: it cuts down on those “What’s happening today?” questions! - High-Level Planning for Big Goals
I’m diving into how to keep the bigger picture in view with a special tool I rely on for annual and quarterly planning. This one’s all about setting yourself up for a smoother, more intentional year.
Resources Mentioned:
- TOP Planner - The go-to for anyone who loves pen and paper planning. Check it out at TheTOPPlanner.com.
- Artful Agenda - My top pick for digital planners, with fun customization options like color schemes and stickers. Syncs with Google Calendar, iCal, and Outlook. Check it out at www.megansumrell.com/artful
- Skylight Calendar - Perfect for family or household coordination. For a detailed breakdown, go back and listen to Episode #251! Check out the calendar at www.megansumrell.com/skylight and use code HARMONY for 15% off.
- Kaleidoscope Living Wall Calendars - Beautiful and practical for high-level annual planning. Check it out at www.megansumrell.com/wallcalendar.
Ready to take action?
Now is the time to decide what tools you’ll use in 2025. Listen to this episode, make your picks, and get ready to kick off the new year with a system that actually supports you. And remember—before you send me a message about a specific planner, go back and ask yourself: Does it fit into one of these categories? If it does, it’s a thumbs-up from me.
Let’s dive in and make 2025 the year we stay on top of everything while keeping it simple!
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FULL TRANSCRIPT:
[00:00:00] Every single person needs either two or three tools in order for them to truly master their planning and time management for 2025. Hey, friends, welcome back to work life. Harmony. Well, it is that time of year. If you are listening to this episode when it is airing here in November, where, oh, my goodness, if you are out on social media or any, like, office supply store, drug store, et cetera, you are going to see everyone is looking for that silver bullet solution.
[00:00:31] To say, okay, 2025, I'm going to get organized, right? You're seeing ads, products, et cetera, all highlighting the fact that this is going to help you get organized, whether it's in the form of a planner, organizational bins, books, resources, et cetera. And this is also the time of the year where I start getting a billion questions from people asking me, What do I recommend or telling me, Hey, I was thinking about doing this.
[00:00:59] What do you think? So I thought it would be a great opportunity to come on here today and share with you four specific tools that I highly recommend to absolutely everything. Anyone. All right. That's going to help you be more organized when it comes to your time in 2025. So let's go ahead. We're going to break down kind of the purpose that each one of these tools serves and why I personally recommend it.
[00:01:26] And I'm here to tell you, I use all four of them. Okay. So this is why I feel comfortable recommending it now at the heart of it. Every, I mentioned four tools, but here's what I want you to understand. You're not going to use all four of them. Okay. Cause one, one set, you're going to be choosing one or the other, but every individual I firmly believe needs to have either two or three planning tools.
[00:01:55] Now, why do I say two or three? There's a distinction here. If you are in a stage of life where you are single, meaning you are not trying to coordinate with another human being, maybe you don't have a partner, you're not managing young kids, et cetera you're going to need Two tools. Okay. So when I look back in, you know, my twenties, early thirties, I needed two tools.
[00:02:17] Now, if you are in a stage of life where you live in a house with other people, you have a partner, maybe you've got kids, you could potentially even be in a stage where you're caring for parents. All right, then you're going to need three tools. Okay. So I'll make sure as we go through this, you understand where that third one may or may not fit in.
[00:02:35] So first, the first tool that everyone is going to need to have. Is a tool that tells you what you're doing and when you're doing it in, I think of this as like the tool that keeps is in most in the weeds of your life. All right. And this is where deciding what planner you are going to commit to building your time management system around.
[00:03:01] Okay. And when it comes to picking your planner, you're going to need to first make the decision of paper, Or digital. Now, a lot of people have hybrid. I do hybrid. I have to use a digital calendar because people are booking appointments with me, setting, you know, setting meetings, etc. But my go to, what I call my command center, is still a paper planner.
[00:03:23] I, I'm a paper planner gal. So the first tool, again, is going to be your planner that tells you on the daily and weekly What you're doing and when you're doing it, right? And this is where your weekly and monthly planning lives. I always talk about four levels of planning. Okay, so when you're doing weekly and monthly planning, you're doing it in your planner.
[00:03:49] So as you are debating between paper or digital, I am going to tell you the tools. I recommend for each. No surprise to you that of course, I'm going to recommend the top planner. If you are a paper planner user, all right, this is what I personally use. It comes in two different sizes. It comes in four different colors.
[00:04:12] This is where I do my monthly and weekly planning. This is where we organize that day to day life as it relates to how we're spending our time. This is also our reference to make sure that in the confines of a week or a month, we're not getting overbooked and overscheduled. Now I have very strong feelings about what makes a good planner versus not.
[00:04:38] If you, you know, maybe the top planner is not for you. I have an entire YouTube playlist where I do planner reviews. There are plenty that are great choices, but what I want you to avoid if you're a paper planner person, is anything that's highlighting, it's gonna be your life planner, right? A planner should just be telling you what you're doing and when you're doing it, otherwise, it gets chaotic.
[00:05:01] All right? We need to keep it simple. Now, if you're someone and it's also important to know that the top planner does come in a printable version as well. So you can just buy the downloads and print them. And then we also have, I call it a digital version, but it's really meant for, it's kind of like an editable PDF.
[00:05:19] It's meant to be used on an iPad. It's not software. Now, if you want to be fully digital, think. Google Calendar, iCal, Outlook, right? Here is the tool that I recommend. I actually recommend using Artful Agenda. I have shared this piece of software before. It is a beautiful marriage of the fun of a paper planner because you can customize colors and covers.
[00:05:44] You can actually add digital stickers, all of that. But it fully integrates with Google Calendar. Outlook, iCal. All right. So if you want to be fully digital, you may want to go ahead and check out artful agenda and you can actually do full monthly planning in there in ways that you can't with other digital platforms.
[00:06:07] All right. So that's tool number one is where are you going to be doing your weekly and monthly planning? So either paper or digital, and if it's paper, I recommend the top planner. If you want to go fully digital, I recommend artful agenda. Okay, now let's talk about Tool number two, this is the one where I said, Hey, you know, you may or may not need this tool depending upon if you are in a stage of life where it's just you, or if you are managing and coordinating calendars with others.
[00:06:36] So if you're in that stage where you are managing and coordinating calendars with others, you are going to need to have some form of what I call a family communication center or a household communication center. All right. And this is the tool where I am. Helping to coordinate and keeping my home and my entire family in sync.
[00:06:56] And what I love is when you implement this kind of household or family communication center, it empowers everybody that lives together to know what's going on, who's in charge of what. And I'm not the one being asked a million times a day, what's going on, where are we going, who's driving, who what's for dinner, et cetera.
[00:07:18] I have shared the tool that I love. I personally recommend the Skylight calendar. We actually did an entire episode on the podcast about family communication centers where I talked very in depth about the Skylight calendar. You can go back and reference episode number 251 if you want to learn more about it.
[00:07:38] So is there overlap between some stuff that goes on? My planner versus our family communication center. Yes, there's going to be some overlap, but I'm not regurgitating my weekly plan into the family communication center. That'd be way overkill and there's stuff that goes on the family communication center that does not go into my paper planner.
[00:08:01] So they're serving very different purposes. All right, your planner, either digital or paper again, the purpose is telling you what you're doing and when you're doing it. Over the course of your day, week and months, the family communication center. The purpose there is to empower and coordinate and centralize with everybody that you live with the things that are important for them to know.
[00:08:26] All right. So that. You're empowering, especially if you've got young kids, you're empowering them to know what's going on when things are happening. And then they start learning about planning as well. Now, the third tool, and this is one that everybody should have. And this is a really interesting nuance here.
[00:08:47] And this is around where you plan, manage, and coordinate all of that. Longer term things, large projects, maybe some goals, long term travels, all right, things that aren't going to show up necessarily as you're looking at your plan for the week. All right. Now, a lot of people try and use. a traditional calendaring tool, whether it's paper or your Google calendar for this longer term kind of quarterly annual planning.
[00:09:21] But the problem is when you're using those tools, you can't get the right visibility in place to make them work. So what do I mean by that? Well, let's think about a traditional, whether it's paper or a Google or Outlook calendar. All right. If you go and. You know, your views are either daily, weekly, monthly, or then you can go look at a yearly view, right?
[00:09:47] All you're seeing is a picture of a calendar with all the days on it. You can't see information in there. You can't easily see, hey, when is that 10 day spring break? When are the kids off for that? When, when do I have this work trip planned? When do I have those large reports do, right? You can't see that longer term information.
[00:10:08] You also can't. Easily see if you're planning out a long project. You can't easily see with those tools where it might make sense to protect time on your calendar to protect it to get progress done on certain days. It's hard to make a commitment of when it's going to be done because you just can't get the right level of information.
[00:10:31] All right. So this is where I strongly encourage you to have some form of a large calendar that allows you to see out at the kind of 30, 000 foot view. Now when I was talking about the, the paper planner, right, the tool that you're going to, or your, your daily planner, your weekly planner was talking about how that's where we do our weekly and monthly planning.
[00:10:55] Well, this. Longer term, higher level planning. This is where I'm really leveraging a tool for my quarterly and annual planning. Personally, use these gorgeous, colorful calendars from kaleidoscope living. We'll put a link in the show notes there for you. Now, not everyone has the space in their home to have that.
[00:11:15] All 12 months up from these calendars. You don't have to have all 12 months up. Right. And you may choose to use a different tool, but I really believe that every single hang on, I'm going to go back cause the dogs are squeaking,
[00:11:32] but I. Absolutely believe that if you don't have a way for you to do that longer term planning where you can be blocking out time for projects for trips for times of your life, maybe with work or at home where, you know, this is a really intense time. I probably need to make sure I'm not saying yes to things here.
[00:11:53] When people ask me like, how is it that you continue to grow the business and still stay on top of everything at home and continue to work on your personal goals? It's because of that higher level planning, that quarterly and annual planning, and that I can visually plan, map out and protect the time I need for that.
[00:12:14] So quick recap here. Everybody needs to have a bare minimum of two tools. One for their weekly and monthly planning and then one for your longer term strategic high level project, etc. planning. Alright, so you need to choose either paper or digital. If you're gonna do paper, obviously I'm gonna recommend the Top Planner.
[00:12:34] You can check them all out at thetopplanner. com. If you prefer, if you want to be fully electronic, Artful Agenda. The second tool, again, for that longer term, I love my large, beautiful wall calendars from Kaleidoscope Living, but there are lots of other ways that you can achieve that. And then the third optional tool, if you are someone that is coordinating schedules and calendars inside of a home, I strongly recommend the Skylight Calendar.
[00:13:03] And friends, that's it. Those are the three categories of tools that I believe if you implement one, you commit to using it. Right. And then you learn the right system for how you're going to keep those plans in place, which is what we learn how to master inside of the top program. It will be a game changer for you in 2025.
[00:13:26] So if you're thinking about sending me a message and showing me a picture of some. planning tool or even a specific planner to say, Hey, Megan, would you recommend this? My answer to you is going to be, go listen to this episode, right? And does it fit into one of these categories and is it going to support your planning system?
[00:13:41] And if so, then I'm going to give it a thumbs up for you. So take the time now to decide what you're going to commit to using for 2025 and get those things in place.
