This year, I feel like I’ve seen more Instagram and blog posts with this title than ever before. Setting up one’s planner for the coming year means different things to different people– for some, it seems to be an elaborate and labor-intensive process! I admire the creativity and care, and I’m sure beautiful, hand-crafted planner layouts give some people a lot of pleasure. I also can’t help but wonder whether the most time-consuming planner set-ups sometimes result in the least follow-through in actual planner use throughout the year. But I do think a bit of preparation can go a long way in making a planner an effective tool.

I have been using the Nolty Gold diary for several years now. It has pre-formatted pages that work well for my purposes (which involve retrospective logging as much as planning) so my “set-up” is pretty minimal. Here are my usual steps.

I’ve recently started to use the yearly page spread to pencil in a few major annual things I might need to plan around, like avoiding seasonal crunch times at work when I’m scheduling a vacation.

I add the habits I want to track to the monthly Gantt chart pages, and add additional pencil lines as needed to keep the rows straight.

I note any work holidays and pre-existing appointments in the weekly pages throughout the year, and I transfer any short-term to-do and grocery list items from the last week of the previous year to the first week of the new year.

I add pages at the end of the diary for my resolutions/goals for the year, and notes/future appointments to be added to the following year’s diary. I also close out the past year’s diary by making notes on how I did on my resolutions and goals. These pages cover things like how much money I want to save, how many books I want to read, how much weight I want to lose, and reminders about recurring household tasks like changing water filters, having the gutters cleaned out, and when to fertilize the plantings.

The Nolty diary comes with a detachable booklet in the back that I use for long-term lists. I tend to re-use these for at least 2 years at a time, so this year, I just moved the one I’d had in my 2024 diary. Some years, I end up re-writing the lists, and archiving certain list items elsewhere. (I need to do a separate post about long-term list management, as it’s one thing I continue to struggle with in terms of finding the best balance between notebooks and electronic tools.)

Finally, I transfer odds and ends I keep tucked in the front and back of my diary– a few sticky notes, a $20 bill for emergencies, and a postage stamp or two.

And I almost forgot 2 other very basic but important steps that I usually do before I even start with anything else: I write my name and contact details inside the front cover. And I always put nail polish on the ends of the ribbon markers so they won’t fray. (I do this with any notebook that has a ribbon marker.)

That’s it! It’s pretty simple and it doesn’t take too much time. This planner set-up works well for me and I’ll keep using it til it doesn’t! I’ve written about my planner/logbook methods in the post “How I Use My Nolty Planner.”

If you’re interested in trying a Nolty planner, they seem to be getting easier and easier to order for those of us in the USA– the 2025 Nolty Gold is available on Amazon now. The Gold version is pricey due to the leather cover and gold page edges, but the ones with faux-leather plastic covers are also great, and also available on Amazon in various formats for around $20– not all have the Gantt chart, so make sure you check the specs if that’s a feature you want to use. In 2020, I made a list of various Nolty models and whether they had Gantt charts or other layouts— their model numbers stay pretty consistent from year to year so that may still be helpful.