Introducing the Ramapani Life Planner

A whole life, one page at a time

The Ramapani Life Planner is a one-page-a-day planner and life tracker that lives inside a single Excel file. Each day gets its own page for mood, sleep, habits, tasks, and a few emoji, and every entry feeds weekly, monthly, and full-year summaries that build themselves in the background.

We made it because paper planners are lovely right up until the monthly review needs a calculator, and most tracking apps want an account, a subscription, and a copy of our data. This one asks for none of that. It comes in five colour themes named after the Five Elements, with the ink, gold, and cream of ramapani.com running through all of them.

How a day works

Open the planner and the Day tab jumps straight to today. Pick any other date and that day's page appears, filled in or fresh. Type in the shaded cells and the entry saves itself the moment it changes, tucked away in hidden tabs, so there is no save button to forget and no page to lose.

Each day has room for:

• Mood and energy on a five-point scale, each with its own set of words
• Sleep, with bedtime and wake time picked from dropdowns, hours worked out automatically, and a quality rating with words of its own ("radiant" is a fine mood but a strange night's sleep)
• Steps for the day
• Twelve activities to tick off, renamed in the Setup tab to suit any life: yoga, invoices, revision, walking the dog, or remembering to drink water
• Up to three emoji, chosen from a list of around a hundred or typed in from anywhere
• Three priorities and a bullet-journal task list
• Notes and a daily gratitude line

A busy day takes two minutes to log. A lazy day can be a mood score and a single emoji, and the summaries still make sense of it.

Summaries that build themselves

Every summary sits on the same page as the day itself, so the bigger picture is always one glance away:

• This week as a seven-day grid of moods, sleep, and ticks
• This month with average mood, energy, and sleep, plus fat bars showing how often each activity happened
• Rolling eight weeks and twelve months, with all-time totals underneath
• Mood by activity, the average mood on days each activity was ticked, which has a habit of revealing which habits earn their place
• A month calendar shaded by mood, so a rough fortnight shows up as a patch of colour
• Sparklines tracing the daily trends

The Year tab

The Year tab is the showpiece: a full year in pixels, twelve rows of up to thirty-one squares, each one coloured by that day's mood and topped with its emoji. Click any square and the Day tab opens on that date. A switch sets how many emoji appear on each square, from all of them down to none for a clean view of the colours, and the bottom of the page totals the year's days logged, average mood, average sleep, and steps.

The extras

• Six countdowns. Give each one a name and a date (and a time, if it matters) in the Setup tab. The Day page shows the days, hours, and minutes to go, ticking over every minute, then counts the days since once the moment has passed. Birthdays, exams, holidays, and the return of a favourite TV show are all fair game.
• A hexagram of the day. In keeping with Ramapani, every day carries a hexagram from the I Ching. Its name links to the full reading on ramapani.com, and for anyone in need of a moment, there is a link to bong the gong.
• A weekly review. Two boxes at the end of each week: what went well, and what comes next. Each week's review is saved with that week and reappears whenever any of its days is open.
• Backup and restore. One click saves the whole log, the weekly reviews, and the Setup tab (activity names, words, emoji, and countdowns) to a plain Excel file in a "Planner backups" folder. Restoring makes a safety copy first, so a restore can always be undone.
• Private by design. No account, no cloud service, no subscription, and no tracking. Every entry stays on our own computer, in a file we own.

One planner, many lives

Twelve renameable activities and a free choice of emoji mean the same planner bends to very different years. While building it we filled each theme with a full year of example entries, and each one turned into its own kind of planner.

• Period tracking. A single drop emoji on period days turns the Year tab into a cycle map, with mood and energy sitting right alongside. A countdown set to the next expected date keeps it in view, and no app ever sees a thing.
• Students. Countdowns to every essay and exam, ticks for revision, gym, laundry, and sleep, and a year grid where exam season shows up as a stripe of colour. The weekly review turns a blur of lectures into something worth reading back.
• Small business. Daily priorities and a bullet-journal task list, countdowns to launches and tax deadlines, and monthly bars for every working habit. Mood by activity earns its keep here: it shows which routines lift the working day and which ones drain it.
• Fitness. Runs, strength sessions, and rest days ticked off, steps and sleep building week by week, and a countdown to race day accurate to the minute.
• Creative journaling. Up to three emoji a day, any emoji at all, plus notes and a gratitude line. By December the Year tab reads like a picture book of the whole year.

The Five Elements

The planner comes in five themes, each named after one of the Five Elements. Every theme has exactly the same features; only the colours change.

• Metal (dark gold): gold and cream on deep ink, the original Ramapani look
• Earth (sepia): warm browns on cream, like a well-loved notebook
• Water (cool): calm blues and greys on a light page
• Wood (colourful): a light page with rainbow activity bars
• Fire (dark colourful): rainbow colours glowing on a dark page

Each theme is sold on its own, or all five come together as a bundle. A backup from one theme restores into any other, so a year of entries, activity names, countdowns and all, comes along for the ride when the mood calls for a change of colour.

What it needs, and where to find it

The planner runs in Microsoft Excel for Windows (Microsoft 365, 2021, 2019, or 2016) with macros enabled, since the macros do the page-turning, saving, and backing up. It will not work in Excel on the web, Excel on a phone, Google Sheets, Numbers, or LibreOffice.

Windows blocks macros in any file downloaded from the internet, so there is one small step before the first use: right-click the downloaded zip, choose Properties, tick Unblock, and then extract it. The getting-started guide in the download walks through this and the rest of the first five minutes.

• All five themes and the bundle: Ramapani Shop: Planners
• Mailing list, for new planners, books and offers: Join the Mailing List

Pick an element, open today's page, and start filling in squares.

If you are still here, then you might like to explore the tag cloud below