An Interactive Digital Planner for Your Medium Content

For everyone who loves digital handwritten notes

Digital planners in the form of interactive PDFs are quite popular, especially for the iPad. Most often used with the Goodnotes app, such interactive PDFs bring back the feeling of paper planners to the digital world.

For planning my daily tasks, I rely on apps that sync with my calendar and reminders app — digital PDF-based planning is not a thing for me in this regard. But where I am very into digital handwritten planning is my Medium content.

I’ve been using a self-created digital planner for two months and I like it. Let me share my experiences and the planner itself with you.

Why handwriting?

This is a legitimate question that is quite easy to answer — convenience. If you have read some of my other articles, you might know that I carry my iPad mini everywhere I go.

The iPad mini 6 supports the 2nd generation Apple Pencil, but there is no good compact external keyboard available. So there are two options to take notes on the iPad mini: the on-screen keyboard or handwritten with the Apple Pencil. Although typing on the on-screen keyboard is quite comfortable on the iPad mini 6, it is slower than handwriting.

Why use a PDF template?

I’ve tried different ways to jot down my ideas. I’ve used Apple Notes for quite a while and then switched to Ulysses where I transformed my ideas directly into draft titles. Both ways are not for me because I was never able to get my notes into any kind of order. Another downside: when it comes to planning content writing and publishing, another app is required. This was too complex for me. So the solution was quite clear.

A digital Medium content planner

I’ve tried other digital planners in the past, even very complex ones that almost had an app-like appearance. However, they were too complex for my content planning which again ended in a mess of notes and no system.

So I set to work on it myself. I came up with a simple, non-interactive PDF that did the job very well. I imported it into Goodnotes 6 and started to write down my ideas in the ideation section of the PDF, then transformed it into an outline and finally planned when to write which article. I have separate weekly views to plan my writing and publishing.

Now I have a system that relies on only one app, that I can use conveniently on my iPad mini to quickly capture my ideas in the moment they spawn, and that finally makes my writing a structured process.

However, the separate planning and publishing views can be useful but may bring unnecessary complexity to the planner. Therefore, I invested some time throughout the last couple of days and transformed this very simple PDF into an interactive PDF with weekly and daily views to unite all facets of planning on one level.

Design must serve the purpose

The purpose of this planner solely is to structure the Medium content. Therefore, I kept the design as minimal as possible. In the design of the Medium logo, the planner is in black and white — a version with a white background and if the dark mode is used on the iPad, there is also a version with a black background.

The interactive planner contains a weekly view where each day links to a separate page for even more space for notes and ideas.

To keep the design clean, I decided to go for a hot corner-type navigation. The bottom-left corner links back to the weekly overview and the bottom-right corner links to the cover page of the notes section.

The line spacing is intentionally quite large because I don‘t want to zoom in to take my notes conveniently.

You want to try it yourself?

If you are interested in trying this planner for yourself, I‘m happy to share it with the Medium community.

The non-interactive and the interactive versions of the planner in both the light and the dark versions are available for download via Google Drive by following this link:

The download is of course free. The planner is only intended for private use.

For a brief tutorial on importing PDFs into Goodnotes, please read this article:

How do you plan your Medium content? Do you use digital planners for other parts of your life? Let me know your thoughts and experiences in the comments!

Enjoy digital planning and thank you for reading.

Tobias

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