Understanding the High Performance Planner by Brendon Burchard

A few years ago, famous personal development personality Brendon Burchard released his High Performance Planner. As popular as it is, many of the reviews seem to miss the point. The biggest fault I notice is in understanding how to use it and why it might make sense for you as your main planner, and why not.

The nitty gritty of how to fill this out is handled in Brendon's video. The short and simple version is to fill out a daily page each day, a weekly page each week, and a monthly page each month. Page by page, from front to back, you go filling it out. This throws some people, who expect a standard planner where you fill out your future dates in an agenda format. Brendon expects your agenda, schedule, meetings, and so on to live in an electronic format. His planner is where you strategize, visualize, and reflect.

What people miss is that the planner is not a neutral place to store to do items and dates, with maybe some writing or journaling space. No, it is an optimized aid to implementing and tracking Brendon's HP6 from his book, "High-performance Habits." It is not meant to help "you do you," it is meant to help you do the HP6.

It is probably better to think of this as a guided exercise workbook for self-improvement instead of as a planner in a conventional sense. This makes it unique among planners. I know of no other planner as opinionated and broadly ranging and focused on a single method as this little gem. This planner is your on the ground guide to practicing the HP6 on a daily basis. Come into this planner looking to improve your scores on the HP6 or not at all, the planner just isn't meant to be used in any other way, and there are many other more general options if you want something other than the HP6.

If you really want to understand the use of these planners, you almost must read the book or take one of his courses. They explain the philosophy and approach that justifies the design decisions, such as why the writing prompts are what they are, why daily and monthly formats are the primary layouts and not a weekly layout, and why there is only the space at the top of the daily page for todo's and such, instead of lots of room for lists like in other planners.

If you want to practice what Brendon preaches on high-performance, this is the best daily tool you will find. If not, you will probably find this planner the weirdest one you've ever had.