15 Creative Ways To Use Your Old / Expired Dated Planner

If you’ve been doing BuJo for a while, chances are, you have a few of them, pretty planners, lying around your room, unused.

Today we change that! Here are 15 ideas on what to do with your old planner.

I bet you still have a few planners lying around.

Maybe it’s a planner you got as a gift and forgot about it. Maybe it’s one that you started using, but it didn’t last longer than January.

Or maybe it’s just another cute-looking notebook you saw and couldn’t pass on.

It would be a shame to just throw them away, so here are several fun and creative ways how to reuse your old planners.

This post may contain affiliate links. They will be of no extra expense for you, but I receive a small commission. Please see my Disclosure for more details. Thank you for supporting Masha Plans!

What To Do With Old Planners

It’s definitely wasteful to just get rid of a perfectly good and cute planner just because it expired.

Hopefully, you agree, and that’s why in this post, you’ll learn 13 different ways of using an old planner. I bet you’ll find among them that one idea that’ll fit you.

Use It Next Year

If you have a planner now but you’re not using it – just start using it for next year! Or use this year a planner you’ve had on your bookshelf for the last 3 years.

It’s all pretty simple, actually. All you need is some stickers to cover up the dates and maybe some washi tape for decoration.

(pssss, if you‘re wondering which washi tape I’m using, it’s from Simply Gilded, and it’s beyond dreamy!)

As you can see, I covered the dates of the week with some date stickers and the big calendar on the bottom right corner with a bigger sticker. And yup! I’m discovering the Animal Crossing world, and it’s pretty much everywhere now, including all my journals.

You can get some printable stickers in my shop that will definitely help you repurpose your planner.

The cool thing about this is that you can actually create your own stickers easily, especially if we are talking about simple date dots.

Use It For Journaling

I’ve been REALLY enjoying journaling lately. It’s such a helpful and therapeutic activity.

Writing down helps you to look at all the things again, reevaluate your day and learn better life lessons you get on the way.

Using your dated planner for journaling is a great idea because you already have pre-made space for each day, just sit down and write.

Another cool way to approach it is by writing letters to your future self, it’ll be interesting for you and for your kids in the future to read these letters.

Use It For Doodling

Do you know how you get better at doodling? By practicing! And your old planner can be a great canvas for doing that!

Pick a doodling theme for each week and do a doodle or two a day according to the theme.

Or maybe follow a doodling challenge to get daily prompts.

With a premade planner, everything it’s already sectioned out for you, so there’s no need to set up special doodling pages – just go for it!

Speaking of, if you want to learn how to doodle, check out my post: Learn To Doodle – Beginner’s Guide.

Use Dated Planner To Take Notes

I bet you have a stack of sticky notes on your desk that probably have some valuable ideas and important information, and they are a mess. Those ideas will be hard to fish out of that stack of notes and are very easy to lose as well.

This is why you might want to use your expired planner for everyday note-taking. It’s an old planner, so you won’t be worrying about adding scribbles there and ruining the page.

But keeping it all in one notebook will help you to keep it organized and never lose any important golden nuggets.

Use It As a Brain Dump

I’ve talked before about the benefits of having a Brain Dump, so if you haven’t done one yet – be sure to read more about it and try this practice a time or two.

Your old planner can be a good canvas for that! You’ll need to write out your heart somewhere, so it might as well be in your old planner.

If you date it properly, it can also be a good reference point in the future to see how your thoughts and creativity have been changing as time goes on.

As for me, I’m using my dated planner to write down notes for my blog and brain dump ideas for my blog posts.

Use It For Language Learning

Learning a new language can be a heck of a job, but it all starts small. Try starting by learning one new word a day.

Your dated planner can be a great help!

Cover the real dates with some washi tape and use your daily boxes for one new word each day.

Daily boxes should be big enough for you to write down all the information you need about a word. My favorite way to memorize a word is to memorize it in a sentence; that’s why I’m also adding examples to each word.

Monthly Goal Planning

Sometimes working on your goals means that you need extra space to plan every step and track the results.

Your usual Bullet Journal might not have enough space for you to do it all, so outsourcing it to a pre-made planner is a great idea!

Plus, it’s already set up for months and weeks; all you need is to change up the dates if you want to, which can be easily done with stickers like these.

Use It As Dream Journal

Dreams are when our brain shuts out the rational part and starts flowing pure creativity so that you might get very interesting and creative ideas from your dreams.

The catch here is that we forget them pretty soon after we wake up.

Unless we write them down in a dream journal!

It’s also really helpful in a different way – when you sleep, your brain works on problem-solving, and often your dreams give you solutions to your real problems or help you understand better your anxieties and worries.

Using a dated planner will be very convenient since you’ll see the progression of your dreams, and later, you’ll be able to compare it to events happening to you at these moments.

Use It As Fitness Tracker

Planning to work on your body? Try using your old planner to help.

You can use it as your fitness Bullet Journal and track workouts, calories, water consumption, and many more things. Make your planner a useful tool to keep yourself motivated and accountable.

Said Masha finishing up that party-sized Reese’s cups pack at 1 am. Yup, I’m not a fitness girl myself, but I’m working on it. Just maybe not today.

Use It As A Memories Journal

Nowadays we tend to preserve our memories on our phones, but let’s be honest – how often do you actually flip through your camera roll? I probably only do it when I’m out of space and need to delete some pictures.

We take thousands of pictures for every occasion, and we end up forgetting about most of them almost immediately.

So I decided to create a memory journal, where weekly, I’d make little pages with memories of sweet little things happening to me.

I know these last few weeks can feel like nothing has happened, but when I pushed myself to create these weekly pages, it surprised me how many things were actually going on.

Your dated planner can be a great place to record your memories, and it doesn’t even have to be a very big project!

Just write one good or important thing that happened each day. Believe me; each monotonous quarantine day always brings a little something!

Plus, these pages are a great way to reflect and be creative.

Use It For Scrapbooking

Speaking of being creative – you can always use your planner for scrapbooking or creating collages.

Bring out all your craft supplies, and put together all the pretty papers and such to cover the dated pages.

No one will ever know what’s behind your artwork!

Use It As A Meal Planner

Eating healthy is not a very easy thing, at least it never was for me. 

Having a healthy meal means finding healthy recipes and specifically shopping for those ingredients without buying the whole candy stand. 

It’s really a lot of bother and energy that I usually don’t have, working 12 hours a day like I do.

But you know what helps? Have a plan! Sit down every Sunday, plan out all the meals and grocery shopping, and just like that, it’ll be so much easier to eat healthily.

I feel like now that we are in quarantine, it might be the best time to start working on that, so it becomes a good habit by the time we are free to go outside again.

Use It As A Work/Study Planner

Whatever your situation with the quarantine is, chances are, you still have to work or study.

Working from home can be extra difficult, so that you might need some more organization, and your good old dated planner will be there to help you.

Even if you’re not facing new working conditions – you could use your planner as a project management journal or maybe just manage your staff.

For example, given that I’m self-employed and my work consists of how well my social media goes, I use an old-dated planner to track my statistics – blog visits, Instagram views, email subscribers, income, and so much more.

If you’re in school, it can be helpful to you as well – record your deadlines, assignments, and projects. I have another post with school journal ideas for you to check if you are a student.

Use It As A Sticker Book

Keeping stickers has always been such an issue for me – you get them, and it’s all different sizes, and when you put them in a folder, you have to flip through them all before you find the right one.

You can use your planner as a sticker book, though!

Use an adhesive to attach your sticker sheets to planner pages, and simply flip through your planner to clearly see every sticker sheet in your collection.

Use It For Decorative Elements

This is probably the most wasteful way to use a planner, but if you were about to throw it away anyways – you might as well use it like that!

Each planner (usually) comes decorated. Amy Tangerine’s planner, for example, comes with a beautiful quote page at the beginning of each month.

What you can do is cut out the decorations you like and use them in your next planner.

It might be a bit time-consuming, but if the doodles are pretty, it’s totally worth it! With adhesive tape, they will easily turn into pretty stickers in your next planner.

That’s all the ideas I could come up with! 

How do you use your old planners? Share with us in the comments!

Hope this post was interesting; if you find it so, please share! If you enjoy my content and want to show your appreciation, please consider supporting me with a cup of coffee.

And always remember! Keep Bullet Journaling, and don’t be a Blob!