I’ve been using the Apple Pencil with the iPad more and more recently and I really enjoy jotting things down in handwritten form. The best app of all I’ve tried for this is GoodNotes which lets you have multiple ‘notebooks’ and multiple templates within those notebooks which is especially great for daily to-do’s and journalling.

What’s not so great, however, are the included templates for this which are fairly generic and safe, and less useful and inspiring than many other ‘systems’ on the market.

I’m a big fan of Jack Butcher’s and love his Visualize Value Daily Planner (so much as to get a physical notepad printed) but ultimately wanted the flexibility of the iPad when I travel so I recreated it especially for GoodNotes, with multiple colour schemes so that it could be used in dark mode too.

You can find the templates I made for GoodNotes below, but I’d highly recommend buying the original from the Visualize Value site (or one of Jack’s courses, which are both excellent).

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It works really well and was a quick ten minute project, but that led me to creating GoodNotes versions of other journal templates that interested me. CGP Grey’s TheME System journal seemed like an interesting take on goal-setting and accountability with theme’s set for the year instead of goals. Goals you can fail at, but a much more abstract theme denotes direction rather than destination and thus even the smallest amount of progress can be considered a win.

I don’t think I’ll be switching from highly structured goals anytime soon, but it intrigued me enough to want to buy a copy of the journal but found that it wasn’t in stock, and due to Grey’s popularity almost never is. People were complaining that even by signing up for the email notification of when it’ll be back in stock, by the time they could check out, it was stocked out again.

Instead of waiting for a couple of months and trying my luck I mocked up an A4 version for GoodNotes to test. It actually works really well, though since it has multiple templates it requires you to select the template you want to use from the new page selector every time. Not too bad since the ‘Goals’ page will only be used between once every few months to a year.

You can find the GoodNotes templates below, but I’d highly recommend buy the notebook from CottonBureau to support Grey.

Let me know how you get on with them and if there’s any other journal or goal-setting / to-do systems I should check out.