Essential 5x8 Monthly & Weekly 2020-2021 Planner - (5x8 - June 2020 Through July 2021)

This is a VERY good planner for the money. No bright flowered colors or daily affirmations. Attractive in a practical way, organized well, and what I really like is that the week is spread out vertically. So you see the whole week and can easily move To-Dos to the next day if you run behind. The pages are not as thick as the fancy-pants leather planners, but thick enough to work through 18 months. Recommended.

I was excited to receive this today! I promptly checked that all dates were correct as I’ve seen some reviews about that- and I am pleased to report that I didn’t find a single issue. It seems the editing is okay now :) I specifically liked that this planner has a top blank portion and a bottom hourly section for better planning. I’ve looked through several other options and couldn’t find anything else like this! I also love the simplicity as colors and quotes are fun but to me, distracting when planning. I am anticipating really getting into this planner and am sure it will be a 5/5 by the end as well!Note: photo of a comparison of a 5x7 and 7x9 as I really wanted to see a comparison because I wasn’t quite sure if the 7x9 would be too big (even after drawing it out on a piece of paper). I’ve always had a 5x7 but really happy I bought a 7x9 this time :)

This is my 3rd planner with this company. I love the added monthly tabs (new this year)! I wanted the vertical days, with space to plan meetings/activities and the notes area to list what I needed to accomplish. It's not a fancy planner, but it gives me every basic feature I was looking for. My husband, college son, and a co-worker now all use this same planner because of how easy and helpful it is!Some of the cons: I wish the spiral binding was just a tab bit larger. I tend to flip my planner completely over, and it's almost not big enough for that. By the end of the year, the plastic near the binding has broken or bent. I wish that there were a couple of lined pages near the month calendar for monthly planning purposes. I do use all of the lined pages at the beginning and end of the planner to track various projects. I also wish that Saturday and Sunday were larger since these are my errand days.

This is the third year in a row that I've bought this planner, and I love it. I have looked at so many other planners, with fancier covers and page layouts, but none of them are nearly as good as this one when it comes to my own way of organizing things. It's fairly simple, but so effective. Some planners give you barely any room to plan out your day with time slots, but this one is half and half for each day. General goals and to-do on top, classes and homework slots all put down below. Simple and easy.I greatly prefer the larger size, which I will fill up completely by the end of a busy school week. I like to re-write tasks each day to keep myself focused, and I actually do have room for that in this planner. The weekend slots have less room, but it always worked for me- while I do tend to work 7 days a week, I will just simplify tasks for the weekend and write in the margins if I really need to.There's also a monthly planner, if you're into that sort of thing. I just write on my wall calendar for anything relevant to the entire month, but at least there's that option. I will sometimes use that space for scratch paper or writing something down really quickly.The new planner I just got for 2020-2021 also has tabs for the months now, which is great. I'm going to actually try to use the bookmark that comes with the planner this time. I have found it a bit flimsy in the past, but it does actually have a decent amount of places that it hooks onto. You can also just use the sticky notes on top of the bookmark instead, which is what I've been doing for the past two years.

The paper is thick, no bleeding with all my standard pens. There's bleeding with copics, but that's to be expected. Midliners and Tombow have no bleeding. I even tried something very small with watercolors and it held up.It's hard to find decent dot grid planners, especially with thick paper. It's even harder to find a planner with time stamps. I use steno style paper or split a notebook page to create one, so the day columns with time stamps means I've found planner heaven.

I wrote this to the company: “I just wanted to say thank you SO much for this year’s planner. Every year I have to get a planner for my teaching year and it seems every time I’d find one that worked, they’d discontinue it. Last year I found your Essential planner and even though there were no month tabs, it fit my purposes, once I affixed some paper tabs to the months. When I went to reorder this earlier in the summer, though, this planner was not available, so once again, I searched and settled for something else....which turned out to have a flaw in it when I got into using it for the school year.Just on a whim, I searched again for your planner, and there it was!! Not only that, you added Month tabs!! I am truly elated. In a year where I’m having to start school with NOTHING as it should be, it’s a comparative joy to find something that is right, and is even better than it was. “