Analog tools,  Productivity

BaronFig Dateless Pocket Planner


25% off at Story Supply Company: Notebooks for every writer.


When 2020 began I was using an A5 hardcover notebook as a bullet jourrnal, tracking appointments, tasks, reading, birthdays, due dates for publishers—a lot.

In late summer, I realized it was just going to depress me to track COVID-19 cancelled plans, cancelled publication dates, and furloughed projects as publishers and corporations scrambled to stay afloat. I stopped using the A5 notebook, and moved to a pocket sized BaronFig dateless planner.

A pack of four BaronFig pocket sized dateless planners, each with a seasonal cover, costs $14.50 at BaronFig. You don’t have to allocate the seasonal covers to the seasons they depict, but it does make identifying each planner fairly easy.

I’m about to set up one of the BaronFig dateless pocket planners for the first quarter of 2021, so I thought I’d describe how I set it up and use it. This is the Winter cover:

Blue cover showing stylized snow falling on trees
BaronFig Winter dateless pocket planner cover

The cover is thicker card stock; sturdy enough to protect the rounded corner pages, but not too thick to fold back.

The back of the cover has a blank white field; I use it to write the year and season.

Back cover of the BaronFig winter pocket dateless planner
I use the white label field to list the year and season/quarter.

Inside the front cover is a book-plate area, and a title page where you could add your name and email address, or a date started and date finished or whatever suits you.

Inside the front cover of the BaronFig dateless pocket planner showing a field for a book plate or sticker, and a title page area with room for a name and date, and email address
Inside the front cover of the BaronFig dateless pocket planner

Each of the BaronFig pocket dateless planners has 16 two-page weekly spreads:

BaronFig pocket dateless planner showing a blank two-page one-week spread

The weekly spread is designed so that each week has seven days, with a blank area at the end of the right-hand page for notes or tracking habits or what ever.

Because you add the dates, you can decide what day your week begins. Each left-hand page has a line at the top—I use it for the month, and a shorter line on top of the right-hand page; I use it for the week number.

Each of the day areas has a line for the day and date. As you can see, this is a center-stitched pocket notebook; there are no staples.

After the 16 two-page weekly spreads there are two two-page spreads of blank pages, without the divisions for days, and with the lines at the top of the right and left pages.

BaronFig dateless pocket planner plain pages

After those four pages, there are 13 pages of plain dot-grid, without lines at the top, just pure dot-grid.

The BaronFig dateless pocket planner dot-grid pages

The paper, as I would expect from BaronFig, works well with pencil, gel, rollerball, and most fountain pens. I typically use pencils, graphite and a Caran D’ache bicolor red-blue pencil, for daily entries.

Here’s how I set up a weekly spread using fountain pens:

sample spread showing two pages and a week's days
Sample one-week spread

I’m still using a rapid-logging bullet journal entry style, I’m just entering a lot less, and fewer deadlines. I often use the blank space at the end of the week to track birds and books.

I keep the current BaronFig dateless pocket planner and an additional pocket notebook for random notes and shopping lists in an expensive (but surprisingly nice) leather notebook cover, with an elastic to keep it closed, and two elastics running down the middle to hold notebooks in place. I bought it on Amazon for $13.95, and couldn’t be more pleased with it.

This is an affiliate link to BaronFig’s referral program. If you use the link and buy $25.00 worth of goods, (the notebooks are great, as are the pocket planners, but also check out the Squire pen), you get a $10.00 discount, and so do I. 

This post contains affiliate links.