By Kieran, Slate & Serif
Owning an iPad doesn't mean you want to handwrite your whole week.
If you'd rather type your plans than write them with an Apple Pencil, I'd recommend our planner, Slate & Serif. It works in the browser on iPad, with its own daily, weekly and monthly pages, projects, notebooks and monthly finances, and Premium lets you make the pages look like yours. If handwriting every page is the part you love, it isn't the right tool, and it's better to know that now.
The decision that matters: handwriting or typing
It's easy to compare iPad planners on covers, tabs and templates. The bigger choice is how you put plans in.
Handwriting on a planner page is good at feel and freedom. You can sketch, circle, doodle in the margin and write anywhere on the page. Each thing you write sits where you wrote it.
Typing into a planner is good at what happens after. A dated entry knows its date, so it can show up in the right places and move when the date changes. Text can be searched. Numbers can be added up.
Neither is the right answer for everyone. It's a question of which you'll keep doing on a busy Wednesday. Slate & Serif is built on the second.
Do I need an Apple Pencil?
No. You type with the on-screen keyboard or a keyboard you attach. Slate & Serif isn't a freehand handwriting canvas, and it doesn't import a planner PDF or its annotations.
A weekend away, typed
Here's a fictional trip to show what typed planning does on an iPad.
You're taking the train to the coast on Friday at 6:10 pm and coming back Sunday. On the Daily page for Friday, the train goes in as an event. It also appears on Weekly and the Monthly Calendar, so the departure is visible when you're planning the week.
The jobs before you leave become to-dos: book the pet sitter by Wednesday and charge the power bank on Thursday. They appear on those days, on Weekly and in the Monthly Plan task list.
The rest needs more room than a calendar title. Open a project for the trip, which has its own starting layout, and keep the booking reference, the packing list and the address of the place you're staying there. Enter the ticket cost in the Expense Tracker so it contributes to the month's recorded travel spending.
Then the train company moves you to Saturday morning. You edit the event once. The train entry moves from Friday to Saturday on Daily, Weekly and the Monthly Calendar.
Start on Daily, then check the week
The Daily Command Center has your schedule, main focus, top three priorities and to-dos on one side. The other side holds an affirmation, morning and evening reviews, meals, hydration, mood, weather, energy, stress, sleep and notes. On a tablet, that gives you a full page for the day you're in, not just a list of times.
The Weekly Overview puts the seven days side by side with a weekly focus and each day's priorities, to-dos and schedule. It's where the run-up to the trip shows at a glance: the pet sitter on Wednesday, the power bank on Thursday and the train itself.
Personal should mean more than a new cover
A cover makes a good first impression. You also need to like the pages you look at all week. On Premium you can choose themes, covers, bindings, paper and backgrounds, set the font, size and color of the text you add, and use your own photos and stickers. The headings and navigation keep their structure.
What to check on your own iPad
- Typing comfort. Try a few entries on the Daily page with your usual keyboard setup, on-screen or attached.
- Size. View & scale adjusts the workspace. Find the size that reads well on your screen.
- Your old planner. Keep your existing planner files as an archive and start with what's coming up. Nothing imports automatically.
- Your calendar. Google and Microsoft calendar connections and private browser-notification previews aren't available yet. Don't assume your other calendars will appear.
- Trying it first. The anonymous Premium sample is for a laptop or desktop. It shows you the planner with made-up entries and no account or card, but it isn't an iPad demonstration. Sample edits reset after the displayed 24-hour period.
Add Slate & Serif as a preferred source on Google. It's a personal setting that only affects what Google shows you.