How I Pick My Monthly Planner Themes

If you follow me on YouTube, or have watched one of my monthly planning videos, you know that I like to switch my planner every month. I get bored really quickly, and I love change. I also love bright colours, and I love to coordinate my binder with the theme I’m using for the month.

Now while I use Franklin Covey classic size all the time, I have a good selection of binders I can use to change things up - enough to prevent me from growing bored. They always say if you’re excited to get into your planner, whether that’s changing it up, decorating or some other thing, you’re more likely to use it regularly.

So last year, for 2024, I had decided on pre-set themes for each month of the entire year. I planned to coordinate my sticker design and planner charm creation with my themes. Each month, I would create stickers and planner charms to sell that would match my theme. Sometimes I would use my own stickers, and always my charms, but they were mostly to show them off online so I could make higher sales.

Some of my themes were hits and others were duds. It did give me a chance to explore my target audience. I learned a lot over that year. However, I also spent a lot on charms that never sold (you need to buy them in bulk to get them cheap, so you’re left with a lot of inventory). Also, I found I would be purchasing a lot of items on Etsy for further decoration, such as dashboards, clips, and bows.

While I found last year very challenging, (I had very big goals), I learned a lot. I also learned that I really needed to take advantage of the subscriptions I was getting and to stop letting them pile up - hence, my plan for 2025.

Each month is determined by a planner kit theme. In some instances, I combine different planner kits. I did this in January 2025 with Planners Anonymous - I used four different sticker kits, but they all were similar winter themes. However, for February, I used only the Penelope kit from Cocoa Daisy. The caveat here, is that Cocoa Daisy has a variety of planner subscription kits. They range from journaling kits to planner and creative kits. The more you get, the more stickers and options you have for planning. This type of idea is nice, especially if you have more than one planner and want to keep with the same theme throughout.

There are some months where I’m not feeling a specific kit, or your plan goes down the tube when unexpected things happen (mail strikes)! It’s always good to have a backup plan just in case.

Sometimes I feel my matchy-matchy vibe borders on perfectionism, so I would like to release myself from that at one point eventually. (Not everything has to match Sandra - insert eye roll here!) There may come a time when that happens, especially if I run out of stickers.

I like to keep my options open, and I do what feels right in the moment. In my brain, I sometimes stick to specific color palettes for certain months. (i.e. January is ice cold here, so I pick light blue, February is pink because of Valentines Day and March is purple because March is my birth month and that’s my favourite colour; and so on the list goes).

How do you choose your planner theme? Do you even have one? Maybe you stick to one planner cover and it continues to do it’s job as a workhorse. Either way, it means you’re using your planner on a consistent basis and that’s all that matters!

Happy planning everyone!

Sandra