The Phoenix Journal – Best Daily Goal Planner, Organizer, & Calendar for Goal Setting, Gratitude, Happiness, & Productivity – Vision Board & Habit Tracking – 12 Weeks, Undated, Hardcover (Sapphire)

A Super-Mom’s Dream Planner
I’m a working mother of 3 who balances homeschooling with partial clinic/partial home office work, in addition to managing a couple employees, my children’s karate, dance, and music lessons, and the remaining litany of tasks that come with busy family life. I’ve long-since crossed that necessary productivity threshold where using a smartphone (“infinity in my pocket”) to manage and plan my life is no longer worth the risk of the innate potential for distraction. This is THE best all-in-one planner/journal I have ever seen—and I’ve seen a lot! I recently reviewed a number of the top selling productivity journals and settled on this one primarily due to:-DAILY blank journal pages for any as-needed use, right alongside the more rigidly structured Task lists, Key Action lists, and the like. Sometimes they turn into additional lists, other days they are a place of true journaling and self-reflection for me. But they are always useful in one way or another.-The quality, weight, and smoothness of the paper, i.e. it takes to ink so beautifully, like my higher-end journals and stationery. As a lifelong, hopelessly chronic journaler, my appreciation for attention to this element can not be overstated.-The built-in repetition of stating, framing, and reframing visions and goals. Some may find it redundant but from a psychological standpoint it’s actually quite brilliant—it forces you to think about what’s truly most important to you from multiple angles, which aids in crystallizing your own vision for yourself.-The “Extras” in the back for as-needed use—lists, charts, blank pages to make of as you wish. It’s everything I can imagine needing for those unexpected, miscellaneous thoughts, events, or ideas that I want to revisit later but wouldn’t know how to categorize or where best to notate them. It can now all find a home in the planner where I know I will eventually find it again.I sincerely think this is the best of all worlds in the planner/journal space for busy, goal-oriented professional PARENTS who don’t need a bunch of warm and fuzzy parenting quotes with floral and paisley print taking up half of every page. While the online tutorials for using the journal (which I DO recommend watching) seem to cater their marketing towards “younger” and perhaps childless professionals, they have still (though perhaps unintentionally) created the ultimate working-parent planner in the process. I don’t think I’m ever going back. At least, not until my youngest child has successfully graduated and left home! (File under “A Vision of Your Future”…) THEN maybe I’ll get one of those planners with floral and paisley print that takes up half of every page. Until then, I’m a convert to the Phoenix Journal.

A Good Planner, But Please Consider This….
Great planner. Nicely organized. Very sturdy. Paper weight is good. Appears to be based on evidence and good science in terms of goal setting and accomplishment. The size is great for me (B5), not too big or small and not at all cumbersome. But it is HEAVY. And there is no colored pages which is a REAL let down for me. Planners are visual and this one lacks that type of visual stimulation. That said, what I appreciate most in a planner is that it is engaging. It needs to speak to me in a way that when I am completing it, I feel as though I am having a conversation with my best friend about myself and my goals. That is how I measure a good planner. This planner does that somewhat but it does miss this point a little because it is a bit confusing to use. Even the example in the planner, while good, just does not do enough for me to feel like I understand what the planner is asking. There is no good website to go to to figure it out. Their Facebook page is not at all helpful. And the creator has a few You Tube videos that are dated and not as helpful as I would like them to be. Planners are a product that I usually become loyal to. However, when there is confusion or questions or whatever and there is no platform to engage with the product, then it has me looking for another planner. And that is the case here. It just feels like the creator made a good idea/product, made money on it and is nowhere to be found. I will finish using this one but unless there is more help, more insight, more examples, more creator content, more product evolution, more customer input and more creator knowledge of having a pulse of how the product is enhancing or improving the customer’s life and needs, I will leave this brand for another. I do want to point out that apparently there was some issue with these planners that cause the cover to warp a little and the company was really on point about contacting me and letting me know they would replace it and provide me a refund, etc. so their customer service is very, very good but a product, without much personal direction on how to use, is really not a product worth having.

This is the first diary I have actually used daily. I love the layout and the prompts.