A simple daily planner, and why we built our own

Dayboard started as one person's fix for his own working day. This is how our founder describes it:

Nothing in that story is about planning technique. He was not missing a method. The things he needed during the day lived in separate places, and each one took a small trip to reach. That is the problem we think a simple daily planner should solve, and it shaped what we built.

What we mean by simple

Plenty of planners are simple to look at and still take an evening to set up. Our own test is narrower: can you open it in the morning and see what today needs without building a system first?

By that test, we think a daily planner needs four things and can do without most others.

• A short list for today. Short matters more than clever.
• Somewhere to put a loose note the moment it turns up.
• The handful of links you open every working day.
• Your calendar in view, so the list is read against the time you have.

Priorities, tags, projects inside projects and reports can all be useful. In our experience building this, they are also where a planner stops being something you glance at and becomes something you maintain. That is an opinion, and you may reasonably land somewhere else.

The same four things on one Dayboard

A Dayboard is a single screen of widgets. The four things above map onto four of them, and here is what each one does.

Four widgets is also what one board holds on the free Daily plan, which our pricing page describes as a complete workspace for personal use.

Setting it up takes a few minutes

1. Create an account. You start with one empty Dayboard.
2. Press Add Widget and choose Tasks. Type the three or four things today needs.
3. Add Quick Links and paste in the tools you open every morning.
4. Add Notes, then Calendar if you keep one in Google Calendar.

You can drag widgets into a different order, set each one to small, medium or large, and switch the board between two, three and four columns. There is nothing else to configure.

When one board is not enough

Our founder's list was "projects, products, reminders, bookmarks", which is more than one day's worth of things. Dayboard handles that with separate boards. You might keep one for daily work and one for a product you are building, each with its own tasks, notes and links.

The free plan includes 2 Dayboards. Control, at $6 a month or $61 a year, raises that to 5 boards with 12 widgets each. There are 18 widget types in all. Two worth knowing about beyond the first four are Focus Session, a timer for a block of work with a break after it, and Private Notes, which are locked with a password and encrypted in your browser before they are saved.

What simple costs you

Keeping it this plain means Dayboard leaves things out. You should know them before you try it.

If your day depends on reminders or on blocking out hours, a task app or a calendar-based planner will serve you better. We wrote up how we see the main kinds in our comparison of daily planner apps.

Paper counts

A sheet of paper divided into the same four boxes is a simple daily planner too, and for many days it is enough. Write today's short list in one corner, keep a box for notes, and copy in your appointments. What paper cannot hold is the links, and it does not follow you between devices. Those two gaps are the reason ours is on a screen.

What it costs

The Daily plan is free and the first paid plan is $6 a month. What the free plan includes, and why our founder priced it this way, is in our post on free daily planner apps.

Questions people ask