Welcome!
If you are in the market for a new planner, you're in the right place. We have found an absolutely fantastic planner for you that will help you set your goals for the year and will also give you the tools to keep those goals in the front of your mind as you go on through your days and weeks.
This planner not only organizes you, it helps you make your plans around the important things that matter to you so you can feel good about reaching your own personal goals.
Let's look at the best planner: it's The Simple Elephant Planner.
If you are looking for the best planner for students, the best planner for moms or just a great planner for someone who wants to get organized, you are going to want to see this one.
The Simple Elephant has a beautiful planner that is durable, well-made and has thick, smooth pages.
All of these organizational features are bundled into a beautiful, soft leatherette book that comes in 5 different color choices:
Let’s start by looking at how the planner comes when you order it.
This planner comes in a beautiful little box with The Simple Elephant logo on the front in silver foil, which adds to the luxury feel of the planner as a whole. This company definitely thought every aspect of this planner through, starting with the packaging.
First is let’s look at the key features which tell you that this planner is undated, so it is good for any year. There are 12 blank months and 52 weeks to work with, as well as 58 pages of lined notes. So if you are into making to-do lists or journaling, you will like that.
There is also a bonus e-book and infographics you can download. This planner also comes with some free, colorful stickers for you to use.
Here we have the blue, faux leather planner. It feels velvety and smooth, and it is definitely durable like they say. There’s a soft sheen to it, the color is quite nice.
Let’s open it up!
Inside The Simple Elephant Planner, there is a place for you to write your name, and then then next few pages are the focus pages.
These focus pages are important to note in this planner.
If you have a hard time focusing, this planner is made to help with that. You start by writing in your focus page:
After you fill in your focus pages, whenever you are working in your planner and you see that little elephant symbol, it is telling you go to back to these pages to remind yourself of your goals. Isn’t that great?
Once you have finished setting your focus through your goals and affirmations, the next two pages are a mindmap and vision board. If you are a visual person or you are creative and want to see some photos or pictures here, go ahead and be creative and clip out images that speak to you. This can also be part of your goals; where you want to be by the end of the year, or in several years!
The month, year and days are blank in the monthly spreads for this planner which is great for a student or teacher whose year begins in September.
At a glance, this monthly spread has a small space for each day to write down an appointment or a due date. One month spreads across two open pages.You can also use your stickers that come with this planner in here or your own!
There are enough pages in this planner for 12 months.
Right after your 12 blank monthly plans, it goes right into the weekly plans.
We should mention that there are 3 ribbon bookmarks built right into the spine of this planner, so you can go from your monthly plans to your weekly plans and not lost your place.
For the weekly plans there are enough pages for 52 weeks, and like the monthly spread, a week is spread over two open pages. This is nice as it gives you the optimal amount of writing space while still seeing your entire week at a glance.
The weekly plan is undated as well, so you can write the month and year at the top and then your goals for the week. Each day has 7 lines if you leave the bottom line blank, and it runs starting on Monday on t he top left page and has a half space for both Saturday and Sunday on the bottom right of the spread.
You can end by writing in your successes and what you can work on for next week! If you are into setting intentions this planner has got you covered.
The last section of this planner includes the blank lined pages. These blank lined pages can be easily used for so many things such as:
It's time to try out some different inks to see how they perform on the paper pages.
The paper in this planner is 110gsm, so it is quite thick.
For this ink test, we are going to try out a Sakura Pigma Micron black ink pen, a regular blue ink pen, an orange highlighter, a black, fine Sharpie and a black Tombow Dual Brush pen.
For each pen I will make a mark, first with just 1 line, then the second I’ll go over it twice and then the last, 3 times.
There was slight ghosting with the Sakura Micron black ink, but no bleed through! The rest really didn't have any signs of marks which is good, but the black fine tipped Sharpie had ghosting and slight bleed through, which you will see in the photo below.
It is interesting that the Sakura Micron did not bleed through at all and barely had ghosting whereas the Sharpie had both. If you are looking for the best ink pin for a journal or planner, the Sakura performs great!
Tombow Dual Brush pens are also AMAZING for planners and journals. I couldn't believe the Tombow didn't ghost at all on this planner. They can be easily blended and have beautiful brush tips on one end and smaller tip that is firmer on the other end.
Let’s get a bit creative now and make a quick journal spread with some colorful washi tape and some different markers.
This time for color I am going to use Stylefile Alcohol Ink markers. I am almost certain these will bleed through since they are super saturated and are a dye-based ink in alcohol. These are made to soak into paper and dry quickly. But for curiosity purposes, let's see how they will fare here.
For this spread, we are using a few shades of green as we draw some leaves and stems going up the side of the page, and then let's add some pink and peach colors for the flowers.
It's always nice to outline your designs in black ink for fun too. I also used a rice paper sticker because they are so pretty.
As expected, there was bleed through with the alcohol ink markers, but that is likely going to happen no matter how thick your paper is in your journal or planner
This 110 gsm paper held up quite nicely to most of the different inks used here. Again, if you are into being creative with your inks in your planner, Tombow dual brush pens and Sakura Pigma markers will be your best bet.
Markers used for the ink test:
This is a great little planner. It is durable, well-made and is meant to keep you focused. The pages are thick and this can fit right in your purse or bag so it can really be taken anywhere. We highly recommend this as your planner for keeping on tasks and is a great organizational planner for anyone.
We hope you found this review helpful and that we helped you make a great purchasing decision.
Here is the video review of this planner. Be sure to watch and hit subscribe to help support us! We would appreciate that.
Here is a Pinterest pin to save to your planner and journal Pinterest board!
Thanks, have a lovely day.
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Michael Gehrards
February 01, 2024
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