UPstudio Planner - 2019 Composition May 3, 2018 05:00 4 Comments

If you work in the planner world, you almost never know what year it is.  That's because we're always working in the future getting ready for the next few years.  As we are in the midst of planner design for 2019, we're making critical decisions about possible changes.  If you've read this blog before or know anything about UPstudio, then you likely know that we solicit feedback frequently, because we genuinely want to create the best planner for a widespread audience.  We also recognize that change is sometimes hard and not well accepted.  We almost never make a major change without first getting feedback.

Our current evaluations deal with the overall composition of the planner.  In all previous versions, including the current 2018 UPstudio Planner, the individual month layouts come directly before each of the week layouts in that month.  Preceding the month layouts are monthly goals layouts.  There are a few things at play in our minds:

• We've had this layout because having the months directly before the weeks in that month seems to make sense.  It groups them together and is easy for people who may use them in conjunction with each other a little more easily.  The problem is that weeks don't always fall perfectly in line with the month before it or after it (actually, this hardly ever happens), which means that there are always a few days of a month that are grouped with the preceding or following month. There has been confusion from users about days that they initially think are missing, because they don't know to look in a different location for them.  This leads us to the meat of the first potential change:  grouping all month layouts together at the beginning, and all week layouts together directly following the group of months.

• The next thought relates to the monthly goals layout.  To be honest, this layout has always bothered us just a bit, because it has a title.  One of the biggest achievements of the UPstudio Planner is that there are almost no defined ways to use each space, but just by putting the word "goals", we're implying that you have to write goals here.  We want you to write whatever you want in whatever space you want - versatility!  So, we're thinking about nixing these sheets, with the idea that the graph pages found at the end of the planner (or the blank section on the month layout or graph on the week layout) can replace this space.

What do you think?  Will you be able to make goals for each month if there isn't a layout that says "goals"?  Will you go crazy looking at the beginning of the planner for the month of October when the week layouts are in the middle?  Would another ribbon help?  

Let us know what you think, I promise, we listen!

*update*  we received so many requests to leave the goals page, that it's still in there!  You guys can breathe easy now.  Thank you for your feedback!