2017 XO Daily Planner Review

For 2017, XO Planners has delivered three beautiful and fun planners to guide you through the year. All three of the new cover designs are for the daily planner, and as stated on the website, it was “created for every entrepreneur, dreamer, and hustler making things happen.” The 2017 XO Daily Planner will help you become more organized, powerfully intentional, and hyper focused on your goals.

What’s the XO Planner?

If you’ve never encountered an XO Planner before, then here’s a quick overview of what’s inside its stylish pages. There’s a goal setting section at the start of the planner, and after that it launches right into the month of January. Each month has a monthly calendar and a monthly planning page—here you can plan everything from your goals and action steps to finances. It’s a space to guide you through the month. Then there are daily and weekend pages for the entire month.

The daily pages have designated spaces for your unique daily schedule, your to-do list, health, water intake, notes, ideas—and also what you’re grateful for. It even has two different kinds of space for notes. One is a blank box and the other has lines. It’s an incredibly structured page, but it’s also very flexible. The weekend page mimics the daily page, but it’s much simpler. There’s a column for Saturday and one for Sunday. Both have a section for your schedule, a to-do list, and a blank box for notes. It’s very to-the-point.

The planners have a matte finish on the covers, gold protective corners, wire binding, 120gsm paper, 7.5×8 inches, and an inside front pocket. It’s a well-made, well-thought out planner.

What’s Changed This Year?

There have been a lot of changes and adjustments to the 2017 XO Daily Planner. Some of them stand out immediately while others are more subtle, but it all combines to create a more efficient and powerful planner. The subtle changes have to do with the spacing on the pages. Now there are more lines under each section of the monthly overview page, more space for you to budget, and an overall more compact design. This made it possible for a monthly reflection and goal box to be added to the monthly pages.

The daily pages received the fewest changes. Because the layout was also made more compact, there’s now a box for your daily gratitude, but there’s also one less time slot in the daily schedule. Because the daily schedule is blank and you write in your own times, this doesn’t mess anything up. It’s still flexible.

The real big changes, however, happened in the goal-setting section at the front of the planner. There are now four different pages designed to help you set goals, intentions, and plan out the year the way you want it to go. After a page for your important information (passwords, phone numbers, addresses, etc.) and a page for special occasions in 2017, there’s a page with the title “This year I am going to:.” There are 12 boxes and each of them has a different word at the top. You write down what you’re going to do in relation to each of those words. For example, the first box says “Learn” so you write down what you want to learn in the coming year. The boxes are:

• Learn
• Explore
• Improve
• Try
• Join
• Plan
• Visit
• Experience
• Create
• Give
• Help
• Support

After you’ve filled this in, you have the formal goal setting page. Here, you can put down three goals, three action steps for each goal, why you want to achieve them, and a completion date for each. It might seem like you need more than three goals for the year, but the truth is that if you set too many large goals you’re more likely to become overwhelmed and not achieve any of them. This layout is completely different from the goal setting page in the 2016 planner. It’s a clearer layout, making it less confusing to fill out—it’s a major improvement.

The next page is completely new. This is the Personal Commandments page. There are ten commandments for you to fill in and at the bottom there’s space for your personal mission statement. If you’re the kind of person who likes to think about all the details in life or if you’re looking to completely revamp your lifestyle, then this is a very useful page. It’s a space for you think about the way you’re going to live every single day, what you want to project to the world, and how you’re going to conduct yourself every minute of every day.

After this, there’s a page for your bucket list. The bucket list is different from the goal-setting page. It’s specifically for things you want to do and experience—like visiting a certain place, going sky diving, or reading a book you’ve always meant to read. The bucket list is the most fun of all the pages because you’re basically outlining all of the adventurous and meaningful things you want to do in 2017.

The 2017 XO Daily Planner is a very concise, determined planner. It’s meant for those who aim to be intentional every day and create the exact life they’ve always wanted for themselves. If you’re looking to make 2017 your best professional and personal year yet, then you need the 2017 XO Daily Planner by your side every step of the way. It won’t let you forget your goals or get lost in the day-to-day minutia of life.

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