By Kieran, Slate & Serif
We make Slate & Serif for people who want ready-made planner pages with useful work happening behind them. If you want to type your plans, see each day inside its week, keep notes nearby and handle monthly finances in one workspace, it's the planner I'd recommend. It works in a web browser on computers, tablets and phones, and Premium lets you make the pages look like yours.
Here's the thinking behind it, then a walk through the day, the week and everything after.
Two frustrations behind Slate & Serif
The first is about looks. Our frustration was with planner apps that could work perfectly well and still feel clinical. The pages felt impersonal, with little of the person using them in the details. Change the logo and you'd struggle to tell many of them apart.
The second is the beautiful PDF. The covers are lovely and the tabs are clever, but a PDF gives you pages to write on. Write a dentist appointment on Tuesday's page, the weekly spread and the month, and you have three separate annotations. When the appointment moves, you change all three by hand. Hyperlinks get you to a page faster; they don't connect what's written on it. The budget page holds your numbers and leaves the adding up to you. Some fillable files and annotation apps add extra tools, so this is about that common workflow, not every product with "PDF" in its description.
We built Slate & Serif to answer both: a planner that takes on the dull admin of dates and sums, in pages you'd choose to look at.
Start with the Daily Command Center
Focused crops of the Daily Command Center: the work and the person doing it. Fictional entries from our Help guide.
One side of the spread holds the work: your schedule, main focus, top three priorities and to-dos. The other side holds the person doing it: an affirmation, morning and evening reviews, meals, hydration, mood, weather, energy, stress, sleep and notes. They share a page on purpose. A day isn't only a list of jobs.
Picture a made-up Tuesday. Your main focus is renewing the car insurance. There's a meeting at 10, lunch with a friend at 1 and the dentist at 4. You slept badly, and the evening is already taken.
A focus is an intention, not something you can tick off, so give it a to-do: call the insurer for a revised quote. Put the dentist on the schedule as an event. Your questions about the policy go in a notebook. Now you have something to begin, and a fair picture of how full Tuesday already is.
Those spaces behave differently, and that's useful. Writing in the focus box doesn't create a task. A to-do is an entry you can edit, complete or move. Events can be timed or all-day and can repeat, with a category, color, priority, location and notes; appointments also have a status. Writing spaces save as you go, while events and to-dos have their own Save button.
Then open the week, where the squeeze shows
One event and one completed to-do shown on Daily and Weekly. Fictional entries from our Help guide; events also appear on the Monthly Calendar, and to-dos in the Monthly Plan task list.
The Weekly Overview puts all seven days side by side, with a weekly focus and each day's priorities, to-dos and schedule. The Weekly Review gives you somewhere to look back before the next week starts.
Back to the made-up week. The insurer says the revised quote will be ready on Thursday. Then the dentist's office calls: Tuesday at 4 is now Thursday at 10. You edit the event once, and Daily, Weekly and the Monthly Calendar all show Thursday at 10.
Looking at Thursday beside the rest of the week, you can see it now holds the dentist, the quote you're waiting for and whatever was already there. So instead of squeezing it into Thursday, you add "compare the quotes" as a to-do on Friday. To-dos stay connected across Daily, Weekly and the Monthly Plan task list in the same way.
That's the admin a planner should take off your hands: one edit instead of three annotations. The decision about Friday is still yours, which is how it should be.
Keep the details that make the plan usable
A to-do can say "Call the insurer". It gets harder to use when it also has to hold the policy number, your questions and the decision you're weighing; those belong in the notebook, as in Tuesday's plan above.
Twelve project spaces give bigger jobs a structure that suits them. There are seven starting types, such as a trip or an event, and you add sections as the job needs them. Eight goal spaces track reaching a number, building a habit or finishing something. Core includes ten lined notebooks; Premium has thirty, with all 31 note layouts and a fuller template collection on tablet and computer.
Quick Menu keeps the small, easily scattered things nearby: contacts, key dates, birthdays, passwords, a brain dump, quick lists, daily routines and weekly meals. Search finds what you've written. Today brings you back to today's page, and Quick add creates an event or to-do without leaving the page you're on.
Each month has a Calendar, Plan, Review, Finance and Trackers, and the year views give you more distance. Weeks can start on Sunday or Monday.
Give the money its own page
Monthly Finance separates what you planned from what has actually happened. It has an opening balance plus budget and actual columns for income, bills, savings and debt. The Expense Tracker feeds your recorded spending into the month.
Two headline figures answer different questions. "Left to budget" shows what remains after the amounts you've allocated. "Left to spend" works from the actual figures recorded so far, so a bill you've planned but not yet paid can still be ahead of you when that number looks comfortable.
You enter the figures yourself. There's no bank feed, and a missed transaction leaves the picture incomplete.
Make the pages feel like yours
We wanted the appearance to feel personal as well. On Premium you can choose the theme, cover, binding, paper and background, change the font, size and color of the text you add, and use your own photos and stickers. The headings and navigation keep their structure, so you're restyling a planner, not building one. On phones, bindings and backgrounds aren't shown, so the pages get the room.
Core keeps the default Slate & Serif look and includes the main planning and finance tools. Choose Premium if making the planner look like yours is part of why you want one. We think a planner that looks like it belongs to you is one you'll keep opening.
Which device?
Windows PC or Mac. Open it in your browser beside your email and type. You don't need a tablet or stylus to plan digitally.
iPad. Use it in the browser with the on-screen keyboard or one you attach. It isn't a handwriting canvas, so if writing every page with Apple Pencil is the part you love, Slate & Serif isn't that.
Android tablet. Open it in the browser and type into the planner's own pages. There's no file to import into a separate app.
Whatever the screen, check how typing feels with your usual setup before you move your plans.
What it doesn't do yet
It doesn't import an existing planner PDF or handwriting. Keep those as an archive and start with what's coming up.
You can set reminder choices on entries, but Google and Microsoft calendar connections and private browser-notification previews aren't available yet. If external calendar sync is essential to your routine, that is a material limit today.
There's no bank connection.
In the paid planner, private content is encrypted in your browser before it's saved, with device-lock, recovery and backup options. Keep your recovery information and downloaded backups safe.
Try one ordinary day
The Premium sample opens on a laptop or desktop with no account and no card. Use made-up details; they stay in that browser until its displayed 24-hour reset. Give Daily a focus, an event and a to-do. Open Weekly and move the event. Add a few made-up expenses and change the look. Then judge it on whether those ordinary jobs felt easier.
New to digital planning? Moving out of a PDF planner? Coming from a calendar-first planner?
Open the free desktop Premium sample
Add Slate & Serif as a preferred source on Google. It's a personal setting that only affects what Google shows you.