Are you controlling your day, or is it the other way around?
There may never be enough hours in a day to accomplish everything you want to, and poor task planning only makes it worse. Sure, not picking up your dry cleaning on time won’t spell trouble, but missing an important meeting totally can!
If you’re one with a chaotic schedule, it’s critical to become the boss of your time, not its prisoner. That’s where daily planners and daily planner templates come in to save the day, quite literally!
These templates let you plan your schedule meticulously, allowing you to self-regulate in the face of distractions and maximize productivity. In this article, we’ll introduce you to the 10 best daily planner templates that promote smart prioritizing and focused efforts. ⌛
- What Is a Daily Planner Template?
- What Makes a Good Daily Planner Template?
- 10 Daily Planner Templates To Use in 2024
- 1. ClickUp Daily Planner Template
- 2. ClickUp Daily Log Template
- 3. ClickUp Daily Hour Schedule Template
- 4. ClickUp Employee Daily Activity Report Template
- 5. ClickUp Project Planner Template
- 6. ClickUp Holiday Planner Template
- 7. ClickUp Daily Notes Template
- 8. Excel Daily Planner Template by Vertex42
- 9. Word Daily Planner Template by TemplateLab
- 10. Printable Daily Planner To Do List by On Planners
What Is a Free Daily Planner Template?
Daily planners go by many names—a personal organizer, a scheduler, or even a day logbook. Traditionally, it’s a small book or a binder. While physical and printable daily planners are aesthetically appealing, they don’t exactly help you brainstorm and create an effective schedule.
If you’re looking to plan your day with clearer intention, a digital daily planner template can help!
The template has the right framework for designing an activity-packed daily schedule. Instead of scheduling from scratch, you fill out the template’s pre-made structure. This cuts down the planning time and removes the overwhelm and stress of organizing scattered days. 💯
From a business perspective, the template is especially useful for team management. It helps organize project tasks according to priorities and deadlines, keeping workloads manageable for everyone.
What Makes a Good Daily Planner Template?
The type of daily planner template you need depends on whether you want it for personal or business purposes. Still, there are a few key characteristics of good daily planners, such as:
- Customizability: It should be able to support scheduling for different purposes, allowing you to add or delete elements, prioritize tasks, and add subtasks
- Clear structure: Avoid cluttered templates. Quality options have a well-organized, easy-to-follow format with room for adding details for every task
- Collaboration support: Daily planners for large teams (or families) should support collaboration with features like real-time editing, task sharing, and status updates
- Color-coding options: Color-coding is proven to improve productivity. The template should allow you to visualize the urgency of different tasks (and make’em fun to look at!) by assigning colors 🚥
- Trackability: It should help you track the progress of tasks throughout the day and support productivity-based decisions with reports and analytics
10 Daily Planner Templates To Use in 2024
We’ve looked into dozens of options and picked the top 10 daily planner templates from ClickUp, Word, and Excel that strike the perfect balance between functionality and visual appeal. Let’s dig right in! 🕐
1. ClickUp Daily Planner Template
Improved time management skills, reduced stress, and enhanced productivity—doesn’t it sound like a dream? Turn it into reality with the ClickUp Daily Planner Template!
This easy-to-use template lets you organize tasks as Personal, Work, or Goals. It also provides a clear overview through multiple layouts.
By default, the template’s task list is divided into two sections:
- Habit tracker: For repetitive activities like going to the gym, making reports, paying bills, or doing yoga 🧘
- Personal tasks: For one-time tasks like a doctor’s appointment or a client meeting
Set due dates, prioritize tasks, use statuses, and add columns to personalize the space. The Habit Tracker section comes with a streak counter to keep you on track and give you a sense of achievement for meeting goals.
You can further tailor your to-do list with Custom Fields, which allows categorization based on tags like Relationships, Work, Personal Growth, Health, or anything particular to you. The built-in color coding helps spot priority categories with a single look.
Stay on top of your day with ClickUp Views—check your progress on a card-style Kanban board or a Calendar and get a realistic perspective on what your doable schedule should look like.
2. ClickUp Daily Log Template
Which tasks and activities consume a significant portion of your time and energy in a single day? If you’re curious, try the ClickUp Daily Log Template. It’s a game-changer in fast-paced industries—like construction or Agile software development—where tracking everyday progress is essential.
Use the template to:
- Set up a log from scratch (we recommend adding date, task, notes, and time columns)
- Use Custom Fields to categorize tasks and subtasks
- Set priorities
- Review progress (ideally every day) to identify productivity bottlenecks
You can also create team-wide logs, add assignees to the tasks directly, mark completed ones, and hold employees accountable in case of missed deadlines. For project managers, the template simplifies daily log tracking thanks to tools like tag filters, task automations, and ClickUp AI.
To enhance team productivity, connect ClickUp to Toggl, a popular time-tracking platform. The integration allows you to track the time invested in specific tasks, get an insight into process inefficiencies, and create more accurate daily logs.
3. ClickUp Daily Hour Schedule Template
Need more than just plain daily task lists? Take it up a notch and schedule by the hour with the ClickUp Daily Hour Schedule Template. ⌚
This template is divided into sections displaying time slots for tasks in a single window. It’s ideal for operational team management, allowing managers to adjust project schedules according to employee availability.
Leverage the template’s stellar Views—Daily Schedule, Daily Workflow, Absences, and Board—to track team tasks and hourly deadlines. Thanks to the template’s drag-and-drop functionality, you’ll have no trouble moving tasks around.
Use the Daily Schedule View to display tasks as cards on a calendar. Check activity details by clicking on a card.
The Daily Workflow View lists tasks grouped by due dates. Personalize the layout by sorting through Custom Fields like assignees, managers, time estimates, and comments.
The Absences View is a Kanban board outlining tasks unmanaged because of absent employees. The tasks are grouped based on the reason for absence—like sick or emergency leave—which gives you more context for reallocating resources.
The Board View, also a Kanban layout, presents tasks according to their status, such as To-Do or Closed.
4. ClickUp Employee Daily Activity Report Template
Like the previous option, the ClickUp Employee Daily Activity Report Template lets you keep a close eye on your employees’ daily contributions.
The template is designed to pinpoint productivity gaps and errors in process execution. It also aims to replace exhausting individual task meetings with every team member and tailor personalized schedules that prevent burnout. ✅
By default, its layout is divided into three primary sections to showcase the workload for a week.
The first part is Accomplishments, listing out completed activities. Each activity shows the time taken alongside the completion date.
The second part, Ongoing Activities, focuses on tasks in progress. Employees can leave notes on the template to inform their manager if they need assistance with some assignments.
The third section features Upcoming Activities. Use it to monitor future tasks in order of priority and assign extra support where necessary.
5. ClickUp Project Planner Template
The thrill of landing a new project can fade once you start planning it to the very last detail.
Of course, that’s only if you’re not using the ClickUp Project Planner Template!
This template gives you complete control over every aspect of your workflow, from planning the budget to setting expectations and monitoring progress. Use it to document the project’s scope, define team responsibilities, allocate resources, and map out timelines for completion.
The template has multiple Views that let you analyze the project from different perspectives. For example, the Project Activities View lists project-wide tasks categorized according to their current status. Customize the list with due dates, duration, assignees, effort, and risk to support informed decision-making. 📈
Other handy Views include:
- Budget Tracker View: For setting and tracking budgets for every task
- Project Panel View: For grouping tasks based on their effort levels
- Schedule View: For displaying tasks scheduled for future periods in a calendar layout
- Itinerary View: For assessing timelines of different project activities and identifying task dependencies
Add priority tags to tasks and recognize completion risks ahead of time. This makes communicating changes to stakeholders or updating delivery plans easy—you’re always in the driver’s seat!
6. ClickUp Holiday Planner Template
Coordinating employee holidays improves workplace transparency and keeps team deliverables aligned without that awful last-minute stress. But let’s be honest, the chore in itself is a massive pain in the neck.
In that case, the ClickUp Holiday Planner Template is the ace up your sleeve!
The planner has a straightforward format—start by asking your team members to fill out the Holiday Request Form (included in the template). The form collects info like holiday category, department, holiday type (paid or unpaid), month, and duration.
This information is displayed in the Holidays View, which helps the manager approve or reject upcoming holidays and holiday requests, and categorize them according to their status. 🌴
The Calendar View displays the same info—but in a calendar for better time management. Use it to get valuable insights into timelines and spot absence overlaps, dependency warnings, and scheduling conflicts.
Your accounting team will love the Vacation Leaves View! It sorts vacation requests into paid and unpaid and then labels them according to their status—New Request, Reviewing, Rejected, Canceled, and Approved.
Planning a team-building getaway? You’re in luck! This template can also help you plan staff trips by summarizing logistics like flights and hotels. It will be your centralized hub for storing passport, ticket, and reservation info. 🛫
7. ClickUp Daily Notes Template
We’ve all been there, getting ourselves in a pickle after forgetting an urgent task. Or, say, blanking out on an awesome idea after failing to write it down.
Jump in on the ClickUp Daily Notes Template to leave these icky scenarios in the past!
This daily planner template is more than a digital notebook for recording your thoughts. It’s a robust tool for categorizing your notes, to-do lists, epiphanies, and everything in between. Every detail you add is centralized and easily accessible.
Start by filling out the Daily Notes Form that comes with the template. Provide the entry type to enter your content. You can also add explanatory comments to each entry to keep track of your daily schedule.
The entries translate to two Views: Notes and Board. The former groups your notes into lists based on type, while the latter converts them into cards and categorizes them according to completion status.
It’s worth noting (pun intended) that the template is 100% customizable—delete, edit, and add new fields or embellish your record with attachments like photos, charts, or graphs.
Another thoughtful element of this template is its relaxing design and calm color themes, which can keep your stress levels in check on particularly hectic days when trying to keep track of all your daily tasks.
8. Excel Daily Planner Template by Vertex42
Want a simple, printable daily planner template in spreadsheet format? The Excel Daily Planner Template by Vertex42 might be just what you need to work as your own personal planner.
The daily planner covers two days’ worth of planning at a time and has pretty detailed sections, with a small calendar at the top. The main area consists of the following three columns:
- Remember: Use it to add anniversaries, priorities, people-to-call lists, and expected expenses
- Appointments: This column is all about micromanaging your day by the hour. The time slots are divided into 15-minute increments to make scheduling easier for daily tasks
- Notes: Write down anything that you don’t trust your memory with
The template also comes with two additional sheets—Events and Holidays. Use them to keep track of birthdays, anniversaries, public holidays, and vacations.
There isn’t much to figure out when it comes to using the template. Download it, and you’ll get a planner with the default date set to February 14. Is it some secret ploy to mock single people? Possibly. ♥️
Of course, you don’t have to stick to Valentine’s Day—click on the date cell and update it in a jiff. You’re free to tweak the default font, text size, and style.
9. Word Daily Planner Template by TemplateLab
Bad days hit the best of us. We’re talking about gloomy stretches of time when it’s hard to stay motivated. The Word Daily Planner Template by TemplateLab helps you get through those days with its frill-free design.
This minimalistic daily planner template can be edited in Microsoft Word, but you can also print it out and write on it the old-fashioned way. ✏️
By default, the template has the following planner pages to help you set up a wholesome schedule:
- Appointments
- Urgent
- Reminder
- Meal tracker
- I’m grateful for
- Notes
Don’t need some of these sections? Delete them! Want to rename a section or two? Doable! The document’s refreshing aqua tones can promote relaxation if you’re not feeling your best.
This daily planner Word template contains appointment slots starting from 5 a.m., lined at intervals of 30 minutes.
10. Printable Daily Planner To Do List by On Planners
If you’re looking for a fancy daily planner template with grayish themes, you’ll like the Printable Daily Planner To Do List by On Planners.
The template comes with the following sections:
- Top 3 priorities of your daily routine
- Important tasks and times
- Other to-do’s
- Water tracker
- Exercise
- Notes
With two sections dedicated to health—Water Tracker and Exercise—this template is a fantastic choice for those aspiring to make conscious lifestyle changes and stay physically active.
You can customize the template before downloading. Fill out the Start date and End date fields to create a personalized notebook. Determine the final layout and cut-off points and print several pages at a time!
Want to avoid the carbon footprint of printing? Select Digital instead of Printable on the download page to use the planner on your iPad, reMarkable tablet, Kindle Scribe, Onyx Boox, or Supernote.
Daily Planner Templates: Your Ticket to the Land of the Meticulous
A goal without a plan is just a wish—it’s cliché but also true. Failing to manage your time will lead to guilt trips and poor self-esteem.
Daily planner templates give wings to your wishes, whether organizing a family holiday, handling a new project, or creating a content calendar. 🪁
Trust our listed templates to help you kill distractions and work faster toward your goals. There’s no place for guilt when you start making your efforts count!
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