A review of Passion Planner – goal planner and organiser

This post may contain affiliate links. If you click on an affiliate link and buy something, I get a percentage of the sale. Find out more by reading my affiliate policy and disclosure.

I wrote about the Passion Planner in my post about the evolution of my planning system. Now that it’s coming up for a full year of use — I’ve just purchased my Passion Planner for 2018 — I thought I would write a review of Passion Planner.

Note that I am not an affiliate for Passion Planner. I just love it. :p

Review of Passion Planner: what is the Passion Planner?

The Passion Planner is part traditional diary, and part structured bullet journal. It’s designed to help you think about your yearly goals, and then break those goals down into manageable steps.

It’s great for people (like me) who like the idea of a bullet journal, but can’t deal with starting with a blank page!

It includes:

• A passion ‘roadmap’ to help you figure out your lifetime, three year, yearly, and three month goals.
• A passion ‘plan’ to help you figure out what actionable steps you can take to achieve those goals.
• Monthly layout
• Weekly layout
• Monthly reflection
• And various prompts to record good things, to do lists and priorities

Review of Passion Planner: The Roadmap

The structure of the Passion Planner roadmap encourages you to brainstorm ideas and then focus down on the one that is most important to you.

It then asks you to map out specific actions relating to that goal.

Review of Passion Planner: Monthly Layout

The monthly layout combines a traditional monthly calendar for you to record appointments, deadlines etc.

Down the side there are boxes to record your monthly focus, people to see, places to go, and a ‘not to-do list’ to encourage you to think about things to give up.

At the bottom you have space for projects and a blank space to encourage a creative approach to your main focus for the month.

Review of Passion Planner: Weekly Layout

The weekly layout includes a day that runs from 6am to 10.30pm in half-hour slots. This lets you do time blocking, which is a really useful productivity hack. I also use that space to list out my to-do for the day and tick it off. I like a combination of to-do lists and time blocking, because I get to be somewhat flexible on when I do the smaller items.

There’s also space for your weekly focus (I put in two, one for work and one for personal). There’s a box to record good things that happened. Great for practicing gratitude 🙂

Then space for to-do lists and a scratch pad area to use as you want.

Review of Passion Planner: The Good

Things I love about the Passion Planner:

• Structured goal setting and encouragement to break things down into manageable actions
• Paper based to-do system
• Journalling prompts
• Flexible system – space to do your own thing
• The pretty colour and cover design choices! Seriously, this is such an attractive planner 🙂
• The pocket at the back for savings bits of paper

Review of Passion Planner: The Bad

Things I don’t like about the Passion Planner:

• The grey line at 12pm, which divides morning and afternoon. It’s distracting and I’d rather highlight when I intend to take lunch which is a half-hour later.

And that’s pretty much it. I tried to find more to dislike, but after sitting here and racking my brains the only thing is that little grey line. Which is easy enough to ignore!

You can buy a Passion Planner here. You can choose from dated or undated.

Passion Planner Review – 2019 update!

I decided not to get a Passion Planner for 2019. I was not using the goal setting and monthly reflection pages, and they add a lot of bulk. Instead, I opted to get an Agendio, which you can custom make to fit exactly what you want.

I still think the Passion Planner is a great option, especially if you haven’t used a planner before – it will let you see what kinds of things you like to use and what you don’t!