Alright, friends! Here’s your all-inclusive, “let’s dive in,” give it all to me guide to digital planning!
Module 1: Why digital planning?
Digital planning won’t take the place of your phone calendar app, nor is it meant to! Just as your paper planner doesn’t send you notifications or alerts, a digital planner doesn’t have that capability.
What a digital planner does is allow you to write out your tasks, ideas, and plans; something that iCal and Google Calendar aren’t designed to do.
A digital planner helps you use less paper and a big perk is that you can carry all of your planning with you through the mobile app. If you have the same note-taking app on your iPad and iPhone, you can access your planner on both devices. No more lugging around a huge and heavy paper planner in your purse!
I also love that you can erase, resize and move around what you’ve written – something you just can’t do in a paper planner!
It is just so fun to spend time in a digital planner because the options are endless. If you’re ready to get started, this guide is for you!
Module 2: The Essentials
What you need
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a tablet
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a stylus
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a note-taking app that can support hyperlinks
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a digital planner PDF file
My Recommendations
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an Apple Pencil (click here to see iPad compatibility)
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the Goodnotes 5 app
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a digital planner (download a free one or shop my planners!)
Module 3: Planner Download
Getting your planner onto your iPad
When you purchase a planner through my shop, you’ll have access to your download files right away. You may want to refresh your order confirmation screen after a moment or two to be able to download the files.
Your files will most likely download to your Files app on your iPad. Open your Files app, click on the file and share it to your Goodnotes app.
Module 4: Using your Planner
Edit Tools
The best part of digital planning! 🙂 With the pen tool, you can choose from 3 different types of pens. A fountain pen, a ballpoint pen (my favorite) and a brush pen. You can also use a highlighter and eraser as well.
You can choose unlimited colors for your pen tools – game changer!!
If you ever need to resize or move something that you’ve written, you can use the lasso tool. You can also use the lasso tool to copy and paste something you’ve written!
Within the edit toolbar, you can insert images, take a picture and even insert a text box.
The lasso tool is so awesome! You can grab pre-cropped stickers and resize, rotate and copy them as many times as you’d like. No more buying stacks and stacks of stickers! You can even use it to take screenshots of other pages and create your own images.
Adding and Deleting Pages
It’s very easy to duplicate and create additional pages in your planner. You’ll click on the thumbnails tab and click the downward arrow to duplicate that page. Just remember not to delete any of the blank template pages in your planner – once you delete a linked template page, that hyperlink will be lost forever!
Creating Bookmarks and Favorites
A useful feature is to bookmark a single page that you want to access quickly and often. All you have to do is click the bookmark icon and that page will be saved in your favorites folder.
Sharing Pages with Others
With the latest Goodnotes update, you can now collaborate with other Goodnotes users so you can view and edit a family calendar. Woohoo! If you want to share a page with someone who doesn’t have Goodnotes, you can export a single page or the whole planner as PDF file or image. 🙂
This video shows you how to run through one of my planners so you can get a feel for the tools and layout:
Do you think digital planning would work for you? Download a free planner to try it out!
Let me know how you like it! 🙂
Pam
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