2026 Planner Shortlist: Four Contenders Worth Considering

Introduction

Choosing a planner for the next year is one of those small rituals that quietly shapes how the whole year runs. This shortlist pulls together four strong contenders: the Sterling Ink Common Planner B6, the Hobonichi Techo Original A6, the Hobonichi Weeks, and the Hobonichi Cousin A5. Each one covers the full January-through-December span and offers a different balance of yearly, monthly, weekly, and daily spreads.

The thinking behind this list comes from a full year of real use: one year in a boutique B6 planner, one in an A6 Hobonichi used for journaling and memory keeping, and a brief trial with a Weeks borrowed from a family member. If you are deciding between structured vertical weeklies and daily-page formats, these four cover most of the reasonable options.

What Matters When Picking a Full-Year Planner

A few criteria keep coming up as non-negotiable. First, a full calendar year, January through December, since half-year and quarterly formats never line up with how long-term plans actually unfold. Second, a funneling structure: yearly, monthly, and weekly spreads, or yearly, monthly, and daily spreads. Going from a big-picture yearly view down to monthly, then finally to the week or day, is what keeps appointments and events from slipping through. Third, and more optional, a few pages in the back for notes and brainstorming, whether that is a large blank section or just a couple of pages.

How I Planned in 2025

The 2025 setup used the Sterling Ink Common Planner B6 as the productivity book: appointments, events, habit tracking, and weekly planning. It is the full-year 520-page vertical edition, with roughly the first third dedicated to planning pages, including a yearly tracker, quarterly priorities pages, vertical monthly spreads, monthly calendars, and vertical weekly spreads, followed by about 367 blank graph pages at the back.

The adjustment period was real. Coming from years of bullet journaling and DIY planners, the vertical weekly spreads felt foreign for the first few months, and an attempt to decorate every single page led to burnout by February. Scaling back to basic logging, then gradually reintroducing stickers and art, turned out to be the sustainable approach. The Tomoe River paper handled gel pens and watercolor decoration with no feathering or bleed-through, and the blank back pages worked well once journaling moved to a separate notebook.

Sterling Ink Common Planner B6: The Productivity Workhorse

The B6 Common Planner earns its place on the shortlist by being the format that worked. The monthly calendars are genuinely useful, the yearly tracker doubles nicely as a workout, weight, and period tracker, and the vertical weeklies eventually became comfortable for to-dos and time tracking. It is smaller than the A5 and B5 sizes used in previous years, and that turned out to be a pleasant change rather than a compromise.

The caveats are specific: a goal breakdown page and quarterly priorities pages never earned their keep, and there is no dedicated yearly spread for listing every appointment and birthday in one place. Workarounds exist, from repurposing the built-in reference calendar or a blank spread to writing events into the vertical monthlies. Those are solvable problems rather than dealbreakers, which is why another Common Planner remains the most likely pick.

Hobonichi Techo Original A6: The Memory Keeper

The A6 Techo, in a hardcover Hon version, entered the routine as a gift rather than a purchase, and it turned out to be a perfect fit for a different job: journaling, one-line-a-day logs on the vertical monthlies, and daily doodles on the monthly calendars. There is no planning happening in this book, and that is exactly why it works. The daily pages handle journal entries comfortably, and a blank monthly page before each month makes an easy spot for pasted-in photos and monthly memories.

The A6 size itself is the surprise of the year. Nothing else on the desk feels quite as special to write in, and the compact footprint makes it effortless to keep nearby. If it becomes the 2026 planner, the daily pages would take on to-dos, appointments, gratitude, and journaling all in one place, with no weekly spreads at all. That is the most different structure of the four, and the most interesting to try.

Hobonichi Weeks: The Compact Wallet Format

The Weeks is the lightest contender here, tried briefly after a family member passed along theirs early in the year. The appeal is immediate: a wallet-sized format with horizontal weekly boxes on one side and a blank graph page beside them, so there is never an overwhelming amount of space to fill.

The blank graph page was the sticking point in practice, since the left-right split never quite found a natural rhythm for to-dos and extras. A sketched layout in a matching-size blank notebook rearranged the boxes, moved to-dos left, and added a gratitude column, which made more sense. Even so, the Weeks is the least-tested option of the four, and it remains a maybe rather than a front-runner.

Hobonichi Cousin A5: The Familiar Bigger Option

The Cousin is essentially the full-size relative of the Common Planner: yearly calendars, vertical monthlies, monthly calendars, weekly spreads, and daily pages, all in A5. Since the Common Planner is based on the Cousin, the structure feels instantly familiar, just with the addition of daily pages and a larger footprint that has not been used for planning since 2021.

The planning sketch for it is well developed: yearly calendars for period tracking, vertical monthlies repurposed as a priorities-and-events overview with paydays highlighted, monthly calendars for the month’s schedule with the sidebar as an expense tracker, and weekly spreads for to-dos and time tracking. The daily pages would add five small checkboxes at the top, perfect for daily gratitude, plus journaling and a daily doodle, with the blank monthly pages carrying over the memory-keeping habit. It is the most complete package of the four, at the cost of carrying a larger book all year.

Overall Buying Advice

If your priority is structured weekly planning with room for notes, the Common Planner B6 is the most proven choice here. If you want a single daily page that absorbs everything from tasks to journaling and doodles, the A6 Techo is the most charming option. The Weeks suits anyone who wants minimal daily commitment in a wallet-sized format. The Cousin A5 is the pick for people who want the full funnel, weekly spreads, and daily pages together in one book.

One honest note that applies to all four: no planner fixes a setup you have not defined. Before buying, list the spreads you will actually return to, and be willing to leave decorative ambitions at the door. A plain, consistently used planner beats a beautiful abandoned one every time.

Conclusion

Four books, four very different answers to the same question. The shortlist currently leans toward another Common Planner B6 or the Hobonichi Cousin A5, with the A6 Techo as a tempting experiment and the Weeks as a quiet maybe. There is still time before the year turns, and the right choice is whichever structure you will still be filling out in November.