a million monkeys typing

Free (Paper) Organiser Templates

Posted October 28th, 2004 at 08:01am

Not too long ago, when my ailing Palm was proving a little too unstable for my liking, and when I was considering getting back to “life like in the old days” (i.e., before using the computer for everything), I located my nice leather DayRunner organiser that I toted faithfully around ten years ago. As I mentioned in a previous posting, I used to be a DayRunner fanatic, and even went so far as to buy every little knick-knack and add-on that I could. Way back when, spending $20 Cdn for a packet of 25 pieces of paper (the cost of the Project Management forms, for example) wasn’t an issue, and soon my ‘Runner was busting at the seams with all kinds of organisational goodness. Nowadays, money is a bigger issue, as is my distance from any office superstore. Being the proper little Net junkie, I searched online in vain for templates: only some poor Word documents and a bunch of folks hawking print-it-yourself templates for $30 per type. I could easily find the generic contact and calendar refills in WalMart, but the rest were destined to incur real costs. So I fired up Illustrator.

I browsed through the “screenshots” (paper-shots?) of the newer forms available at DayRunner.com and decided that I could produce decent blank-and-white versions of them with modifications and upgrades. It took a little work, but I managed to produce a pretty good Illustrator CS file with fronts and backs for Project Management, Contact Log, To-Do and Notes. They were suitable for the “Classic” size of my DayRunner (8.5 x 5.5, or half the size of a regular letter-size paper), and could be easily printed double-sided, cut, and punched. Note that there are no logos or anything, and should work fine in any similar size DayTimer or generic $15 organiser.

Although I’ve drifted away from my DayRunner again, I figured that I might as well offer these files for all you paper organiser junkies out there. It beats paying $30 per file.

• organiser_templates.zip: in Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0 format

Simply unzip the file, and you should have a directory of eight PDFs, a front and back each for Project Management, Contact Log, To-Do and Notes. Print off a batch of “fronts”, flip the paper over, and print an equal number of “backs”. I use a stock WalMart-bought guillotine for chopping each page exactly in half, and then use a hole-punch (make sure it’s the right spacing for your organiser!) to prep them for the organiser. Don’t tell Acrobat Reader to resize the pages “to fit” or you may not get the forms to line up properly for punching.

If anybody wants the original Adobe Illustrator CS file to make modifications, such as preparing the templates for different size paper, please email me (see my address at bottom right). I only ask that you re-distribute any modifications back into the community.

Hope this helps somebody else out there.

These template files are hereby licensed under Creative Commons.

Update : New versions of this DIY Planner can always be found here.