Kickass Indie Author’s Planner

Hello all you indie authors!

This will be a short post about the planner I made to help keep me organized! I know, I know, who needs a planner? Wait. We all need planners? OF COURSE WE DO. We’re authors.

Anyway, I’ve been on the look out for planners that are specific to authors but haven’t really found any that met my needs. Then I read a cool book on project management and decided to create my own planner based off my needs. (Those two things do follow one another. I want to be better organized so I did my research and in the end, found creating my own planner worked best.)

This planner is pretty simple. It’s broken down as follows:

Calendar for the month:

Here I can plug in my dates and write down what’s going to happen for the entire month.

Monthly goals sheet:

This one breaks down my goals into five categories.

1. Marketing goals
2. Writing goals
3. Reading goals
4. Reviewing goals
5. Other

I want to always be mindful of my marketing goals each month because I want to make sure I’m working on all aspects of my career each month, and marketing is an important part of being an indie author, amirite?

Weekly tasks sheet:

This lets me take each monthly goal and break it down into weekly tasks. This is to give me an overview of the tasks I’ll be doing while keeping my goals in sight.

Weekly planner sheets:

These sheets let me break down my goals into weekly tasks. How can one person eat a dinosaur? One bite at a time, man! This helps me figure out my bite strategy so I consume the whole prehistoric lizard thing. Er.

Daily task sheet:

Here’s where I get to check off my daily to dos. I hear some people even write down shit they’ve already done just to feel the satisfaction of checking it off. Weirdos. 😀 I print off as many daily task lists as I need. Some days I’m not planning to anything but chill. I don’t need a to do list for that.

Reflection sheet:

This gives me an opportunity to evaluate my month. What were my successes? What were my failures? Most of us get the upfront stuff done but forget to reflect on how we did. I challenge you to celebrate your successes and failures each month too. There’s a lot of power in reflecting back.

Would you like to try out my planner? Good thing I like you. You can download it here: Kickass Indie Author’s Planner Pages