Despite being over two months away from the end of 2025, planner season is well and truly here, with stationery fans everywhere figuring out their systems for next year. It’s also the time of year when we all start reflecting on what didn’t work this year, and looking, with considerable guilt, at all the planners that didn’t work out, and dropped off along the way (ahem, I’m talking about me here!).

No one likes waste, and especially given how expensive a lot of planners are, it seems like a huge shame to put them away in a drawer and never look at them again. So here’s a few ideas I’ve come up with, and will definitely be trying out myself to reuse old and outdated planners:

Redate them

The easiest thing to reuse a planner as is a planner! A lot of the time it’s quite easy to cover over or adjust the dates in a planner using stickers, washi tape or correction tape, so you can keep using it beyond the original dates.

Use it to practice layouts for future planners

As we’re once again in planner season and figuring out our plans for 2026, using old, unused planners to experiment with different ideas and layouts can be helpful.
If you’re a content creator in this field, you could also use old planners to demonstrate different layouts and possibilities in your content.

Use it as a notebook

You could also just ignore or cover over the dates and use an old planner as a notebook. A lot of popular planner brands like Hobonichi and Sterling Ink are known for their excellent, fountain pen friendly paper, so why not enjoy it beyond planning?

Ink swatching and pen testing

As already mentioned, a lot of popular planner brands are known for their great paper. This means they can make the perfect place to play around with inks and pens!

I’ve seen a few people online use old calendar pages, with their preset grid format as a place to swatch inks, and it always looks so pretty! Plus it can be a good way to test different pens and inks on that specific paper before you use it in your new planner, especially as brands like Hobonichi have had problems with bleed-through on their paper in recent years.

Use it as a junk journal

Junk journalling is primarily about using the things you have lying around to make art, so why not house it in an old, unused planner?

Remove the paper

If you don’t want to reuse the planner itself, there’s no reason why you can’t simply remove the paper and reuse it. It might be tricky to do in some cases, depending on the planner and binding, but might be worth the effort if you really like that specific paper!

So have you got any unused planners lying around? Do you tend to reuse them, and how?