I first purchased a copy of Greg McKeown’s Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less in 2015, having borrowed it multiple times from my local library. While I often bristle at the category of personal development or productivity books, the ideas in Essentialism spoke to me as someone interested in doing what I felt really matters in both my life and career, through streamlining and self-advocacy, all with a reference towards Dieter Rams’ “less but better”. So when he announced he was releasing The Essentialism Planner, it caught my attention and I purchased it at launch.

For some context, I’m a big fan of keeping a daily note. When I discuss daily notes (including a talk I gave at the Linking Your Thinking conference), I intend to be system-agnostic when I elaborate on the benefits — both in the tools we use, and the types of notes we keep.

The destination and structure of a daily note is a personal choice, and finding the right combination that clicks for your brain is more important than any marketing or productivity pressure. There are benefits and drawbacks to both a physical diary and software, and your needs may change over time. In the same way, there are all types of systems in place, such as bullet journals (Bujo), the Five Minute Journal, Cortex’s Theme System journal, and gratitude journaling to name a few. There are benefits to all of these approaches, but what clicks with a person varies.

With that in mind, how does The Essentialism Planner stack up for both form and function?

McKeown borrows the concept of “less but better” from legendary German industrial designer, Dieter Rams. In Rams’ own words, “’less, but better’ therefore means that we must get away from the unculture of superfluity, of waste, of cheapness in the literal sense, and in the metaphorical sense.” As we reduce something down to its most essential form, it amplifies the need to concentrate on the details and how it will be used.

It’s through this lens that I look at the first printing of McKeown’s book.

When you view the promotional images of The Essentialism Planner online, it looks like a high-quality book you’d expect from McKeown’s brand, and an extension of Essentialism. The squiggles, typography, colour palette, and layout match Essentialism perfectly. It breaks down the essentials: this is the planner based off Essentialism, and it is “Based on the life-changing two-million-copy best seller” though more on that second point later. The hardcover book even features a higher-end cloth-wrapped board, which will help foster the sense of using this item being something special and essential to return to daily.

The cover is a let-down once you have the book in hand, however. It’s not cloth-wrapped, but instead features a digitally printed cloth texture. When I received my brand new copy from Amazon, the paper was already cracking along the spine, showing the white surface through the black ink. While “the essentialism planner” red letters are hit with a nice varnish to make them pop, the book cover is streaked with glue that equally catches the light. And what’s more, the covers don’t sit flat, and that’s even before I opened the book for the first time. I can’t imagine what this would look like sitting on my nightstand or desk sixty days from now after routine use.

The cover isn’t all bad, though. I do appreciate that the back copy, bar code, and regional pricing are printed on an applied sticker. This keeps with McKeown’s minimalist brand design, while also meaning the publisher can print the basic book in English with economies of scale, and then apply different labels for different regions… or cleanly apply an updated label when the price of this book inevitably goes up in both Canada and the US in the future.

I do have questions about how McKeown’s influence and credibility is sold on the cover, though. The cover states that The Essentialism Planner is “based on the life-changing two-million-copy bestseller”, and through the design being a direct homage to 2014’s Essentialism, one would assume it means a singular book. However, inside the book on page 216, it states: “Read my New York Times bestselling book that together have sold two million copies…” It directly contradicts the front cover, which makes me question the ethics of this journal and marketing.

Then again, his website bio states that the two books “together have sold over 3 million copies” so this may just be a case of an editorial error. (If that’s the case, hello Greg and publishers! I’ve found an update for your next printing…)

Brace yourself, as I’m going to get a little nerdy here.

The book is a glue-bound hardcover. This means that the book signatures (or sections of pages) are held in directly and rigidly into the back spine with glue. This is pretty common, as it is an economical approach to producing hardcover books.

However, let’s think about this from a people-first design perspective. It’s a less pleasant experience for the end user, as it means the book doesn’t lay open flat, or at least not without cracking the glue to force it. Glue-bound hardcovers are also not typically recommended for heavy use, though this planner is sold intending to be a short-term 90-day commitment, so it should hold up.

The paperweight feels fine for this type of book, though you can see the ghost of text and lines from the opposite page.

The book has two common cloth elements to it, and the colour choices both nicely reflect the McKeown brand. The headband is the little strip of cloth at the top and bottom between the signatures, glue, and spine. For The Essentialism Planner, it’s a nice simple black which matches the spine and helps it disappear. I will note that on my copy, the top headband is off-centre and leaves a gap between the cover for the first few signatures.

The second element is the ribbon, which is glued in at the top of the book and acts as a bookmark. While the red doesn’t match McKeown’s brand red as it’s a standard bright red, no one is going to notice that. What doesn’t work about this ribbon is that, since it’s a glue-bound book, it sits well in the middle of the book as shipped, but using the ribbon on your first day of writing makes it sit awkwardly at the top of your book. But don’t worry, as it will look perfect when you’re on page 104 (or whatever page it shipped to you as), as the ribbon has already created enough pressure to cause a gap in the pages.

I should mention that I’ve subscribed to both iterations of McKeown’s podcasts, his newsletter, and even follow him on LinkedIn as a content creator case study. And while I’m a subscriber that will inevitably read his next book, I don’t read or listen to everything at this point. He has mastered the fine art of content creator repetition. And I mean this kindly as someone who embraced the essentialist idea of being aware of “the vital few and the trivial many”… There are some great ideas in his work (“the vital few”) but content creation in general is a sea of producing “the trivial many” across multiple channels to extend reach and influence.

I would argue, as a fan of his work, that The Essentialism Planner is “the trivial many”. For instance:

In fact, if you’ve read or listened to any combination of his work, there’s a recognizable pattern that relies on heavily brandable soundbites and repetition of keywords and concepts for recognition. The Essentialism Planner is the equivalent of a clips show, in which an additional artifact has been produced and sold that allows the monetization and extension of the brand, so that the creative team can catch up with whatever their next thing is. In this case, McKeown has been working on doctoral research at Cambridge while balancing being a public speaker, content creator, and a father.

There’s nothing new here, and to an extent… I guess that’s okay? I do take issue with the packaging and promotion of this book, but some will still get real value out of the structure it brings. Through my work in the personal knowledge management community, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with thousands of people about their workflows and processes in thinking, reflecting, and creating. I’ve come to appreciate there are different ways we process information, and that repetition can be good. This journal fits a need in its own way.

Content is created not only as a business enterprise, but because some people gravitate to that style of learning. They need a structure provided instead of self-connecting the dots, even if the content creator has distilled their work from their other sources — YouTube videos, podcasts, books, newsletters, social media… Not only that, but templates (and this is what ultimately this journal is) give people a starting point, and a way to distill other sources into something more focusable and manageable every day.

The bonus content just made me upset. It is transparent marketing aimed at helping the brand, and not the reader. The bonus content designed to get you to sign up and provide contact information, and to introduce you to McKeown’s online course.

I purchased the book at launch, which meant that I had the limited-time opportunity to access to additional bonus content that was left out of the book. I’ll discuss both how that content was presented, the experience of accessing it, but will not be sharing the content itself.

To access the bonus content, I needed to send proof of purchase so that it could be manually reviewed. Once I was approved, I received the form instructions on how to access the three pieces of bonus material: two PDFs for printing out (“The 100-Year Vision” and “The Said No To List”) as well as a video course by McKeown on how to “maximize” my new planner. All I had to do was sign up via another approval link at essentialism.com and create an account.

What the letter doesn’t mention is that essentialism.com is McKeown’s online course environment, The Essentialism Academy. It’s the same thing he promotes through his other marketing channels, including the $79 “21-Day Essentialism Challenge” (though free if you bought the book, but only the paperback copy… sorry e-book or audiobook readers, you are second citizens). It’s one of the many $79 courses available, though you can also subscribe for $299 per year if you want to really buy in.

With the bonus content for The Essentialism Planner, I didn’t need to have a paid account, but I did have to provide billing information to access free material. It also defaulted to signing up new users to the newsletter, and offers the opportunity to receive even more marketing materials from The Essentialism Academy. What a deal!

For “The 100-Year Vision”, the categories for family and the tenses used to describe the categories struck me as odd. Without going into detail on the exercise, it calls out grandparents (past tense, and with a design error including a numbered list while no other category received it), parents (past tense, assuming if they’re alive they have nothing more to achieve), you (it’s all future, baby!) and next generation (children, grandchildren).

While I do appreciate that it recognizes that not everyone has children, the whole exercise feels weirdly presumptive of whom we have in our lives. A person can be going through the passing of their parents or grandparents, or be adopted and processing that, nor have the knowledge of their family tree. They can also be estranged from family, whether that be parents or children. And not everyone can have children (a painful reminder to some), or want to have children.

“The Said No To List” is a blank space to list every time you said no this quarter. It’s well named, but certainly not worth forking over my billing address for. It also includes a dot grid to visualize your mortality, assuming that you’ll live eight years, with one dot per quarter. Is it a good use of my time every quarter (assuming I bought this book and want to do this exercise quarterly like the page suggests) to fill out the same dots, only to add one more? Your mileage may vary, and I’m always a fan of data visualization… but I have things to do with my “one precious life” and this doesn’t feel very essential to me.

What’s more, for both of these activities, they are laid out to perfectly fit in the book and even visually include the fold in the page as though it were in the book. If you print these out, they’ve been given a yellowed background to match the page colour in the book. Even if you printed this in black and white instead of full colour, you’d be printing a light grey across the whole printed sheet because of this design choice. I often look at the path of the essentialist tied in with our environmental impact on the planet, and I can’t help but feel these choices were made without consideration.

These two exercises would need two spreads (four pages) in the book to be able to be included. It’s too bad there’s no room in the book for them, and that instead two spreads (four pages) are instead dedicated to blank lines. Oh, wait.

I recognize that a lot of my critiques about the physical production choices in this book were done to make this planner economical. After all, if this becomes your daily tool, you’ll need about four of these a year to make that happen. At $27.99 Canadian per book before tax, this is already a premium expense, given that a Moleskine planner that covers the full year is around the cost of one copy of The Essentialism Planner, or you could use a simple notebook.

The planner has been designed to be mostly time agnostic. There is no mention of months or specific days of the year, like there are in many calendars. However, this also isn’t a true perpetual calendar as the first daily note starts on a Monday, and gives blank space to fill in the month and day.

What if I started January 1st? In 2025, that was a Wednesday. Do I just waste 2% of my journal to start on the Wednesday, or do I cross out the day of the week for the next 90 days? The same goes for if you miss a day, then suddenly, you either waste the pages, or cross out the day of the week until you sync up your dates again.

While we begin these rituals and routines with the best of intentions, life happens. There are so many ways productivity tools reward routine and consistency, but don’t account for when things go wrong. Once that chain is broken, whether it be closing rings on your Apple Watch, or filling out days in your planner, it’s not uncommon for one day to become two, to become three. The barrier to give yourself grace and restart can be tough. I’d argue that the design choices made in this journal add to that barrier, and work against the idea of the essential.

As I’ve said, I own and appreciate both of McKeown’s books, and I have recommended Essentialism to many in the past, and will likely continue in the future. My review of The Essentialism Planner comes from the perspective of someone who is likely in McKeown’s target audience, but I feel it’s important to consciously critique both content and form.

I’m disappointed in The Essentialism Planner, first and foremost because I don’t think it aligns with the values from McKeown’s own book. The promise of quality that I would expect from a writer who cites “less but better” does not align with what has been produced, both in form and in function.

My disappointment only grows with the bonus content, which was marketed as being an incentive to buy the book early. If I felt the journal was a cash grab given the production quality and recycled content, then the bonus content instead feels like a grab for my personal information and attention for further marketing.

This book is not for me, and nor could I recommend it to anyone else.