By Kieran, Slate & Serif
Switching planners needs a better reason than a fresh cover. If your appointments, notes and routines already live in one place, moving them takes work, so the new planner has to solve something that matters to you.
Here is the case for our planner, Slate & Serif. If you want designed planning pages, room for the work around your dates and a monthly budget in the same place, and you don't need your planner to sync with an outside calendar right now, I'd recommend it. If you do need that sync, read the next section first.
Start with the calendar question
If you're coming from Artful Agenda, first check how much you rely on its calendar connections. Artful Agenda's FAQ explains its calendar support.
Here's where Slate & Serif stands today. Google and Microsoft calendar connections and private browser-notification previews aren't available yet. You can set reminder choices on entries. The connections described below are between pages inside Slate & Serif, not with an outside calendar.
If your routine depends on external calendar sync, that's a material difference. Don't buy Slate & Serif assuming it's already working. If your planner is where you plan, rather than a window onto a work or family calendar, keep reading.
Look at the work around a date
A fictional house move shows what Slate & Serif is built for.
Moving day is one event on Saturday the 14th. It appears on Daily, Weekly and the Monthly Calendar, and if the moving company moves you to Sunday, you edit it once.
Moving day is also surrounded by jobs: book the van, forward your mail, measure the sofa against the new doorway. Each becomes a to-do on the day you mean to do it, and appears on Daily, Weekly and the Monthly Plan task list.
The rest is reference: quotes from moving companies, meter readings, the new landlord's number, which box the kettle is in. That goes in a project. Slate & Serif has twelve project spaces with starting layouts for different kinds of job, and you add sections as you need them, such as steps, money, people and measurements. Longer notes can live in a notebook.
Weekly Overview lets you see those jobs beside the moving date before assigning more to a day. During move week itself, the Daily Command Center gives each day a main focus ("pack the kitchen") and a top three. Its other side has sleep, energy, stress and an evening review, so you can keep your own observations beside the work.
Give the costs a proper place
Moving costs don't fit in a calendar title.
Monthly Finance headline totals and bills. The electricity bill has no actual recorded yet. Fictional figures from our Help guide.
Monthly Finance separates budgeted and actual figures for income, bills, savings and debt, with an opening balance. Expense actuals come from the Expense Tracker, so the van deposit and the cleaning supplies are counted as you record them. It's manual entry, with no bank connection.
Make the planner feel chosen
On Premium you can change the theme, cover, binding, paper and background, style the text you add, and use your own photos and stickers. Core keeps the default look, and both plans include the planning and finance tools.
Look is a good reason to like a planner, but not the only one. Before deciding, open the week, a project and a long note, and see whether the structure suits how you think.
Moving your plans across
Slate & Serif is its own typed browser planner. Don't expect an existing calendar, planner file or annotations to import. Start with the next few weeks of plans and leave the archive where it is.
Try it with a fictional project
Open the Premium sample on a laptop or desktop. It needs no account or card, and its edits stay in that browser until the displayed 24-hour reset. Add a date, a next action, a reference note and a cost, then move the date and see what follows.
Add Slate & Serif as a preferred source on Google. It's a personal setting that only affects what Google shows you.