The Life Coach Planner is InMotion Planner's most comprehensive digital planner: designed to go beyond time management, with space to reflect on your priorities and track your life goals.
This article guides you through getting started, whether you've already purchased it or are still considering it. I create my planners like traditional stationery, but in digital format, designed to be used on a tablet with a note-taking app and a stylus. If you're new to digital planning, our complete guide and our introduction to compatible apps cover the basics in detail. Here's everything the Life Coach Planner contains, and how to make the most of it.
What the Life Coach Planner contains
1. Reflection and personal development
The planner starts with the Wheel of Life: a diagram that divides your life into 8 areas, across 4 main sections, to assess where you are and identify what needs more attention. This section is called Life Projects in the planner, and it's from this reflection that you define an annual vision and objectives for each area.
- Professional Life (Work & Career, Money & Finance): your career goals, the steps to achieve them, and tracking your personal finances.
- Creative Life (Physical Environment, Pleasures & Hobbies): arranging your living space and the time you dedicate to what makes you feel good outside of work.
- Social and Romantic Life (Family & Friends, Couple & Love): the time you set aside for your loved ones, with family, friends, or your partner.
- Development and Well-being (Personal Growth, Health & Vitality): your learning, your physical and mental health, and the habits that help you progress.
What truly sets this planner apart is that each area then gets its own space for reflection. For each of the 8 areas, a first page asks a series of targeted questions (your vision, main objectives, strengths, challenges, three-stage action plan, how to measure progress), a second Vision Board page lets you visualize this area with images and keywords, and a third page gives you a tool adapted to its nature: a budget table for finances, a birthday and event tracker for family and friends, a progress tracker for career, and so on, depending on the area.
It's almost a complete coaching process, applied to each of the 8 areas of your life, rather than just a simple list of objectives.
2. Monthly Planning
Each month opens with a classic monthly calendar, followed by 5 pages for reflection before diving into the month.
- Goals: one goal, one action plan, and one source of inspiration for each of the 4 sections of the Wheel of Life (professional, creative, social and romantic, personal life).
- Vision Board: a space to visualize your monthly goals with images and keywords. Read our complete guide to creating a successful Vision Board.
- Tasks: an Eisenhower matrix to sort your monthly tasks into do, plan, delegate, and drop.
- Notes: a free space for anything that doesn't fit elsewhere.
- Review: your highlights, a re-evaluation of your 8 life areas out of 10, a day-by-day habit tracker, your accomplishments, your challenges, and ongoing tasks to keep an eye on.
3. Weekly Planning
Three distinct weekly pages, to choose from depending on what your week needs.
- Weekly Overview: your important and urgent tasks, distributed day by day.
- Weekly Schedule: the whole week at a glance, with a complete hourly grid from Monday to Sunday.
- Weekly Notes: a dedicated space for each day for anything that doesn't fit elsewhere.
4. Daily Planning
Each day has its Schedule page: an hour-by-hour grid from 6 am to 11 pm, with 4 task categories in parallel (Work/Money, Home/Hobbies, Family/Friends, Growth/Well-being) to maintain an overview between your schedule and your priorities by area.
No need to fill everything out
The Life Coach Planner has 764 pages, which might give the impression that you need to fill everything out to benefit from it. This is not the case.
All navigation is done via hyperlinks: the side tabs (Year, Month, Sections) and quick links on each page take you directly where you need to go, without ever scrolling through hundreds of pages in between. If you only use the weekly schedule and never the weekly notes, you click on the one you use each week and ignore the rest.
The same logic applies to the 8 life areas or the 5 monthly pages: you choose those that meet a real need, not all of them out of obligation. A complete planner is a library of tools available, not a list of chores.
The different files
Upon purchase, you receive 6 PDF files: 3 versions of the planner, each available in 2 color palettes.
The 3 versions
- Style 1: daily pages with structured schedule, ideal for time-blocking.
- Style 2: more flexible daily pages, designed for daily tasks and notes rather than a fixed schedule.
- Without daily pages: for those who prefer to organize their daily life only with the weekly pages.
The 2 color palettes
Each version is available in a black and white palette with touches of bright colors, or in a rainbow palette. The content of the pages remains identical, only the tabs and accents change.
You choose the version and palette combination that best suits your planning style, without having to open all 6 files to compare.
How to fill in the dates
The planner is undated: no dates are pre-filled, which means it works for any year, indefinitely. You fill in the dates yourself, starting from general to specific.
It all starts with the annual calendar, at the very beginning of the planner: you annotate it once with the key dates of the year. You then do the same for each monthly calendar, once a month. As a month can cover up to 5 weeks depending on the year, each monthly calendar is hyperlinked to 5 weeks from the start, to cover all possible variations without ever running out of space.
Once the dates of the month are entered, you click directly from the calendar to the corresponding week, then to each day, and you write the date on these pages as the week progresses. Navigation therefore goes from general to specific: year, then month, then week, then day, without ever going back to look for a page.
The advantage of this system is its durability. You keep an original, blank copy in your files, and you duplicate it each new year to start again with updated dates. No need to wait or buy an annual update, your planner remains usable year after year.
What to do when a month extends to 6 weeks?
Some months of the year exceptionally span 6 weeks according to the calendar. As the planner is designed with 5 hyperlinked weeks per month (i.e. 35 daily pages), this situation requires a small adjustment. Here are three ways to manage it according to your preference.
Option 1: The simplest, which I use myself: use the first daily page of the following month for that last day. For example, for August 31st, go to the first page of September and cover the word "September" with a text box in Goodnotes, choosing the classic font with a white background. The hyperlink from the calendar of the first week of September works normally, and the page integrates perfectly into your weekly view.
Option 2: drag an unused daily page from the beginning of that same month to the end of the month, then write the missing date on it. The hyperlink still works on this moved page.
Option 3: duplicate an existing daily page and write the date by hand. This method is the fastest but does not benefit from a hyperlink from the monthly calendar.
How to get started
1. Download and import your file. After purchase, download the 6 PDF files from your account on the website (3 versions x 2 palettes). Keep a copy of each in a folder on your device, choose the combination that suits you, then import this PDF file into your note-taking app (Goodnotes, Notability, etc.).
2. Choose your cover. The planner includes 10 cover pages. Drag the one you prefer to the front of your file.
3. Explore the structure in read mode. Before writing anything, activate your app's read mode so that the hyperlinks are active, and browse the side tabs (Year, Month, Sections) to locate each type of page. This avoids searching on the fly.
4. Enter your dates. Follow the method described above: annual calendar, then monthly, then weekly and daily as the weeks progress.
5. Complete your Life Projects. Before diving into the first month, fill out the Life Projects section as best you can: Wheel of Life, reflection, and goals by area. This will inform your monthly goals later on.
6. Start with your first month. Once your Life Projects are in place, start your first month: monthly goals, then the first week. The rest follows naturally, month after month.
To learn more about using Goodnotes daily (pen, highlighter, lasso, stickers), consult our complete tutorial on Goodnotes features.
Tips for using the planner regularly
The most important thing after preparing your planner is to refer to it regularly.
A simple tip to build this habit: associate your planning with something you already do every day, like your morning coffee or your commute. This principle, known as habit stacking, anchors a new habit to an existing routine, making it much easier to maintain long-term. Personally, I open my planner with my coffee, when I start working.
I then check my schedule 3 times a day. You'll find your own rhythm, but here's how I do it.
In the morning: I start with my daily page, my focus for the day, a gratitude, then my tasks and schedule. I also plan time for physical activity or a well-being moment.
Early afternoon: after lunch, before resuming work, I take a few minutes to check that I'm following my daily plan and tick off what's done.
In the evening: I tick off the rest of my completed tasks and reflect on my mood of the day, before rating it. Unfinished tasks move to the next day, and I already plan some elements for tomorrow to start on the right foot.
Also note down anything that clutters your mind, even if not directly related to your planning. It helps to disconnect and rest better.
Use the weekly page at the beginning of the week to organize the days ahead. The key, as with everything, is regularity.
Where to find your digital planner
The Life Coach Planner is available in 2 undated cycles: August to July, to follow the school year rhythm, or January to December, for a classic calendar year.
The Life Coach Planner was designed as a complete companion, from reflecting on your 8 life areas to your daily schedule. Whether you start with the August-July or January-December version, the structure remains the same: you choose what you fill in, at your own pace.
I created this planner with my own need in mind to juggle professional and personal life, with a tool comprehensive enough to keep track of everything, yet flexible enough to adapt to your way of working rather than the other way around.
Once your dates and initial goals are in place, all that's left is to open it every day.
