The Ultimate 2020 Planner Gift Guide
My other holiday gift guides are full of great ideas, but if you came here for planner gift ideas, you’re in the right spot! I hand-selected 11 of the products I’m most excited to give this season to fellow planner lovers. I fully support if you want to self-gift any of these to yourself, too—I won’t tell! (#selfcare) I’ve organized each product by brand from the four I love and use the most: Erin Condren, bloom daily planners, Simplified, and Mäksēlife. All four companies make amazing planners and planner accessories at a price point that is accessible.
Erin Condren
The Focused Planner™
Erin Condren’s Focused Softbound Planner is the perfect gift for the functional planner in your life. The 8×10 is sleek and streamlined with a horizontal daily layout with plenty of room for flexibility and creativity. This 12-month dated agenda book (starting January 2021) is designed for yearly, monthly, and weekly planning and is ideal for both left-handed and right-handed individuals. Durable, portable, and well-crafted with thick, high-quality 80# mohawk paper bound with a reinforced spine and a designer vegan leather cover, this is the perfect planner for professionals and stylish minimalists. The Focused Planner retails for $35 but is temporarily on sale for $24.50! For an extra special touch, personalize the planner for $4 extra.
Leather Notebook
I’ll never tire of feeling Erin Condren’s smooth vegan leather covers and 80# mohawk paper as I leaf through a new planner or notebook. Their 7×9 signature slate blue vegan leather cover is debossed with the Mid Century Circles design and it’s ideal for professionals, men, and stylish minimalists alike. The new coiled notebooks have more pages, more customization options, and new designs! Choose your page layout (lined, dot grid, productivity or sketchbook) and fill the notebook’s 160 pages with your plans and projects, lists, notes, thoughts, and more. Add snap-in accessories like dashboards, bookmarks, sticky notes, and more to enhance your notebook’s functionality! As I noted above, add personalization to the notebook cover for a special touch.
bloom daily planners
Pocket planner
OK y’all, this pocket planner was born to be a stocking stuffer! At its current 4”x6” dimensions, the pocket planner packs just enough planning punch,alongside bloom’s signature motivation and life coaching configuration. bloom’s soft cover planners were designed with love to inspire and empower you to bloom into your best self this year! This is more than just a planner – it’s your paper life coach, accountability partner, and personal cheerleader. Ready to be less busy and more productive? Me too! I love bloom because of their commitment to giving back—each purchase goes to support some awesome causes like the Thrive Global Project and the Arouet Foundation. For just $9.95, the bloom pocket planner includes premium features like gold foil accents on cover, monthly tabs, 100gsm bright white paper, and recyclable metal lay-flat spiral binding.
Happy Blooms Clipboard
bloom offers hundreds of free printables and resources that they’ve designed, sometimes in tandem with creators like me, to help you get more out of your planning and goal-setting journey. No product is a better accompaniment to those printables (and any planner pre-work for that matter), than this Happy Blooms Clipboard. Easy on the eyes and resolute like any good clipboard should be, this 9”x12.5” standard clipboard coordinates with bloom’s soft cover planner and teacher planner in the same design! The Happy Blooms Clipboard sells for $12.95 with free shipping on orders over $39.
Mäksēlife
Companion goal-setting notebooks
I shared this in my review of the 2021 Mäksēlife planner, but the name Mäksēlife comes from the phonetic spelling of moxie, which means “force of character, determination, and nerve to approach life with gumption and spirit.” At its core, Mäksēlife gives you the tools that you need to support your goal-setting and goal-achieving journey. The companion goal-setting notebooks takes the signature Mäksēlife goal-setting system and gives you an undated series of 4 notebooks. This is truly the perfect accessory for any planning system. Each notebook is undated and covers three months in an A5 layout that is supremely easy to navigate. Your goals are never far away!
Sticker Book
Mäksēlife’s functional sticker book matches their signature color-scheme and includes some of the most-used shapes for marking goals, lists, tasks, and appointments. Stickers are made from high-quality matte paper for writing on, and each page is perforated for easy removal and storage. The 5”x7” book of 15 pages includes 1744 functional stickers. The sticker book retails for $20.
Simplified
Weekly planner
Simplified’s biggest sale of the year is taking place right now, which is reason alone to check out their expansive array of beautiful and functional planners! Their daily and weekly layouts complement more niche teacher and wedding planners, and it’s the weekly planner I’m excited about this year! Simplified’s design and layout makes planning fun; as they put simply “The Simplified Planner is a beautiful, joyful agenda for busy women in all seasons of life.” The 12-month weekly edition features a bookbound, lay-flat binding, a navy inside liner and pocket, 4 lined notes pages in the front and 27 in the back, and luxurious 70# Mohawk Via paper. Monthly coaching from Emily Ley, their founder, is included with the purchase of any planner. These planners are on sale for $38 at the moment!
Simplified apparel
Their shirts are colorful, plentiful, and comfortable—there are more than a few designs on my gift list this year.
Emily’s books
Emily Ley’s books range from the serious deep-dive into branding and production (perfect for a side hustler or solopreneur in your life), to guided journals and study guides that relate Emily’s inspiring story as a mother, creative, and entrepreneur. Her coaching focus is on minimalism and simplifying your daily life, and the Simplified planner was borne from this mentality.
Honorable Mention
Happy Planner Disney collection
Did I go a little crazy and buy nearly one of everything when Happy Planner released their Disney collection in October? I feel no shame in sharing I did. If you have a Disney + planning fanatic in your life and they haven’t gotten into this Happy Planner collection, it’s a gold mine! At publication of this post, approximately 50% of the 24 products are already sold out, so make sure to get a jump—they’ll go fast! If you don’t know where to start, I’m partial to the Mickey & Friends Sticker Value Pack and the Mickey disc set!
Cloth & Paper sticky notes
All the Cloth and Paper accessories, including these sticky notes, are stylish additions to any planning system. Y’all know I love sticky notes, and these notes from Cloth & Paper are a beautiful alternative to the Post-It notes that normally dot my planner spreads. Consider the habit tracker, shape sticky note set, or the sticky note tabs for gift ideas. My boyfriend loves the “Urgent” memo sticky notes; he’s taken to leaving me these around the house with passive-aggressive notes about decidedly not-urgent tasks. Ah, the small joys of quarantining together!
Additional gift guides:
- Small Business Gift Guide
- Intentional Gifts for someone who has everything
- Work From Home Gift Guides
