I Tried Using the Planner I Designed for Amazon KDP

Creating a planner is one thing. Actually using it is another.

It is easy to sit at a computer, design a collection of pages, upload the finished book to Amazon KDP, and convince yourself that everything is perfect. The boxes look nice. The pages are organized. The ghosts are adorable. World domination appears to be proceeding according to schedule.

But will the planner actually work in real life?

That was what I wanted to find out when I started using My Evil Planner for World Domination, an undated planner I created for Amazon KDP.

Instead of simply showing the finished book, I filled it out and used it myself. That way, I could find out which pages were useful, which ones needed adjustments, and whether I had forgotten anything important.

Because nothing exposes a planner’s weaknesses faster than trying to plan your actual life with it.

Why I Made an Undated Planner

Check out the planner in my shop

One of the most important features of My Evil Planner is that it isn’t tied to a particular year.

You write in the month, dates, and other information yourself. That means you can begin using it in January, July, October, or during whatever mysterious stretch of time exists between Christmas and New Year’s Day.

You also don’t have to feel guilty if you stop using it for a few weeks. With a dated planner, unused pages can make it feel as though you have failed some kind of productivity test. An undated planner simply waits until you are ready to return.

No judgment. No wasted months. No tiny paper calendar silently glaring at you.

This also makes the planner more practical as an Amazon KDP book because it doesn’t become obsolete at the end of a particular year.

Planning My Evil Goals for the Year

Near the beginning of the planner are pages for recording your Evil Goals for the Year.

Despite the name, these goals do not have to involve taking over a small country or building a secret laboratory beneath your house. They can be ordinary goals such as:

• Finishing a book
• Growing a YouTube channel
• Starting a business
• Saving money
• Developing a better creative routine
• Completing an art project
• Finally, organizing the room where miscellaneous craft supplies go to multiply

I enjoy having a space for large yearly goals before getting into the monthly and weekly planning pages. It provides a general direction for the year without requiring every detail to be decided immediately.

The planner also includes room for yearly thoughts and notes, giving you space to brainstorm before turning those ideas into actual plans.

Monthly Plans Without a Fixed Starting Date

Each monthly section begins with an undated calendar spread.

You write in the month and add the numbers yourself. This makes the planner customizable. You aren’t forced to begin on January 1, and you aren’t wasting part of the book if you purchase it halfway through the year.

The monthly calendar provides space to record appointments, deadlines, trips, projects, filming days, birthdays, investigations, and any other activities involved in your particular brand of world domination.

Beside the calendar is a Murder List.

Before anyone becomes alarmed, this is the planner’s darkly humorous version of a regular to-do list. It is meant for murdering unfinished tasks—not the neighbors who mow their lawn at seven in the morning.

Probably.

Weekly Evil Plans

After each monthly section, there are several weekly planning pages.

Each day has its own area, making it possible to divide larger monthly goals into smaller steps. This is especially helpful when you are balancing several projects.

For example, one week might include:

• Writing a blog post
• Editing a YouTube video
• Designing a book cover
• Photographing new artwork
• Researching a haunted location
• Uploading a new KDP book
• Remembering to buy groceries before the household is reduced to crackers and suspicious freezer items

Using the planner myself allowed me to see whether the weekly sections gave me enough room and whether the layout felt natural once I began filling it in.

That is an important part of designing any low-content book. A layout can look attractive on the screen but feel completely different when someone writes on the printed page.

Evil Productivity and the 30-Day Challenge

The planner includes an Evil Productivity page with sections for top priorities and a larger evil to-do list.

I wanted this page to help separate the tasks that genuinely need attention from all the smaller things competing for space in my brain.

Everything can feel urgent when it is floating around in your head. Writing it down makes it easier to decide what actually matters.

There is also a 30-Day Evil Challenge page. This can be used to track almost any habit or project, including:

• Writing every day
• Drawing or painting regularly
• Uploading content consistently
• Walking or exercising
• Decluttering
• Reading
• Saving money
• Working on a novel
• Avoiding the internet long enough to complete one meaningful task

You choose the goal and use the chart to track your progress.

I like this section isn’t limited to traditional productivity goals. It can be used for creative challenges, personal habits, business projects, or any other experiment you want to try for thirty days.

Dark Thoughts and Notes

Every month includes pages for Monthly Dark Thoughts and Monthly Dark Notes.

The dark-thoughts page uses a dot-grid design, which gives you more freedom than a standard lined page. You can use it for brainstorming, mind maps, sketches, habit trackers, project layouts, or elaborate diagrams explaining how your cats secretly control the household.

The lined notes page is better suited for lists, journaling, reminders, research notes, or ideas that need a little more structure.

I wanted to include both styles because people organize their thoughts differently. Some people like neat lines. Others need arrows, circles, doodles, and a series of increasingly unhinged annotations before an idea makes sense.

Grocery Lists for World Domination

The planner also includes a Grocery List for World Domination.

The page divides groceries into categories such as fruit and vegetables, dairy, meat, essentials, other items, and budget.

This is one of the more practical sections in the planner, although the title makes grocery shopping sound much more impressive.

You are not simply buying bread and cat food. You are gathering provisions for the next phase of your master plan.

The budget section also gives you a place to keep track of how much you intend to spend. That is useful because even villains must occasionally acknowledge the limits of their bank accounts.

Evil Vacation Plans

Because villains need breaks too, the planner contains vacation-planning pages.

There are areas for airline information, reservations, things to do, items you must bring, and a daily vacation schedule.

This section can help keep travel details in one place instead of scattering them across emails, screenshots, scraps of paper, and vague memories of something you were supposed to book three weeks ago.

It would work well for an ordinary vacation, convention trip, weekend getaway, paranormal investigation, or suspicious retreat to a remote castle.

What I Learned by Using My Planner

The main reason I wanted to use the planner myself was to discover whether it worked outside the design program.

When you create a low-content book, it is tempting to focus almost entirely on appearance. Appearance matters, especially with a themed planner, but the book still has to be functional.

Testing it helped me consider questions such as:

• Are the writing spaces large enough?
• Is the order of the pages logical?
• Do I have enough weekly pages for each month?
• Are the headings clear?
• Are there pages I use more often than expected?
• Is anything missing?
• Are any pages repetitive or unnecessary?
• Does the planner still feel fun after I begin using it?

Those are difficult questions to answer by looking at a digital preview.

Using the physical book turns the planner from a design project into an actual product.

Why Creators Should Test Their Own Low-Content Books

Anyone can assemble a collection of pages and call it a planner. Testing helps turn that collection into something people may genuinely enjoy using.

When I create another planner or low-content book, I want to continue testing it whenever possible. Even a quick trial can uncover problems that weren’t obvious during the design process.

You might discover that a box is too small, a heading is confusing, or an important page is missing. You may also find that a page you added almost as an afterthought becomes one of the most useful parts of the entire book.

A proof copy is not merely something to photograph for the Amazon listing. It is an opportunity to examine the product, write in it, carry it around, and see how well it survives contact with real life.

Is My Evil Planner Ready for World Domination?

My Evil Planner was designed for people who want a functional planner without the plain corporate appearance of most productivity books.

It combines practical planning pages with ghosts, skulls, bats, spiders, webs, skeletons, and a sense of dark humor. It doesn’t take productivity too seriously, even though it gives you tools to manage serious projects.

Most importantly, because it is undated, you can begin using it whenever you are ready.

You don’t need to wait for January.

You don’t need to wait for Monday.

You don’t even need to wait until your life is organized.

That is what the planner is supposed to help with.

Your first plan may not cause complete world domination, but at least you will remember what you need from the grocery store.