Free vision board printables

The five sheets

Each one corresponds to a stage of the practice, and each is a single page designed to be printed on A4 or Letter. Use one, use all five, or print the ones that match where you are.

The direction sheet

One page for the sentence that everything else hangs off. Your direction, the obstacle actually in the way, and one action with a trigger attached. Print this one first, because a board built without it tends to be a collection of images rather than a direction.

The board plan

A fifteen box grid at the four to one ratio of process images to outcome images, with prompts in each box so you know what you are looking for. Fill it in before you start collecting, and the collecting takes an hour instead of a weekend.

The one week experiment

Seven days of the full loop on one page. A morning line, a step with a trigger, an evening rating and a note. The cheapest way to find out whether a daily practice fits your life before you commit to anything.

The evidence log

A month of dated single line entries, each tagged as movement, learning or a disconfirmation. This is the sheet that pays off later, because thirty entries read in one sitting show patterns that were invisible day by day.

The year in review

The five look back questions, answered against your own record rather than from memory. Built for the turn of the year, and useful any time a direction has gone quiet.

How to print them

There is no download button and no file to manage, because the sheets are web pages laid out for paper. That turns out to be simpler for everyone.

1. Open the sheet you want.
2. Use your browser's print command. Command and P on a Mac, Control and P on Windows.
3. To get a PDF instead of paper, choose Save as PDF from the destination or the PDF menu in the print dialog.
4. Leave the scale at one hundred percent. The sheet is already sized for one page.
5. On iPhone or iPad, tap the share icon and then Print, then pinch outward on the preview to save it as a PDF.

Everything except the sheet itself is left out of the print, so you will not waste a page on navigation, and the ruled lines and boxes print cleanly in black and white.

Using them with other people

These get used in workshops, classrooms and team offsites more than we expected, so a few notes for that.

• For a group session, print the direction sheet and the board plan only. Two sheets, about ninety minutes, and everyone leaves with a shopping list rather than a half finished collage.
• Give people the direction sentence to take away overnight. Almost everyone changes it, and the second version is usually the one that is actually theirs rather than the one that sounded respectable in a room.
• Do not display the finished boards. A board somebody knows will be seen by colleagues is a board they have edited while making, and an edited direction is worth very little.
• With students, use the one week experiment rather than the board plan. It produces a result inside a term and it teaches the reviewing habit, which transfers to everything else.
• Set the review date in the session. Whatever else you skip, do not skip this. A room full of boards with no review dates is a room full of paper.

Print as many as you need. We would only ask that you link back here rather than rehosting the sheets, so that corrections reach the people using them.

Why these are free and why there is no email form

Most free printables in this category are not free. They cost an email address, which is then used for a sequence designed to sell you something, and the sheet is the bait.

We would rather you had the sheets. Everything we publish is written to work with a notebook, a Photos album or any app, and these are the paper version of that. If the paper version is all you ever need, that is a good outcome and it costs us nothing worth protecting.

We do make a manifestation and vision board app, which is a paid subscription. What it adds over these sheets is that the review happens continuously rather than when you remember, and the board changes in response to what you actually do. Those are real conveniences and they are not the mechanism. The mechanism is on the paper.

Which sheet to start with

The guides these sheets come from are vision board ideas for the imagery, turning a vision board into daily action for the step and the trigger, how to track evidence without forcing positivity for the log, and new year vision board ideas for the look back.

Why paper still earns a place

We make a phone app, so it would be convenient for us to argue that paper is obsolete. It is not, and there are three specific things it does better.

The first is that writing by hand is slow, and the slowness is doing work. A direction sentence typed in four seconds is usually the first phrasing that came to mind. The same sentence written by hand gets revised while you are writing it, which is why the direction sheet is the one people report changing most between the first draft and the second.

The second is that a sheet on a desk is not competing with anything. Every app on your phone is competing with every other app on your phone, and most of them were built by much larger teams to win exactly that competition. A page next to your keyboard has no such problem.

The third is that paper does not require trust. There is no policy to read and no question about what happens to what you write, which matters more in this category than in most, because the material is what you want, what you are afraid of and what did not go well this week.

Where paper loses is visibility and memory. A sheet in a drawer is invisible, and a paper log cannot read six weeks back to you and surface a pattern. That is the honest trade, and it is the same one covered in digital vs physical vision boards.

Getting a board out of a printed plan

A filled in board plan is not the board. It is the shopping list, and the step people skip is turning it into something they will actually see.

• Print photographs at postcard size or smaller. Fifteen images at ten by fifteen centimetres fills an A2 board comfortably and costs very little at a print shop.
• Use your own photographs wherever you can. Recognition beats aspiration, and your own pictures cost nothing to print.
• Screenshot the unglamorous things. The job listing, the course page, the calendar shaped the way you want it. These print badly and work well.
• Photograph the finished board. Then set the photograph as a Lock Screen wallpaper, which is where the board will be seen most.
• Keep the direction sheet with it. Pin it to the board or fold it behind. A board without the sentence drifts within weeks.

That last point is the difference between a board and a collage, and it is covered properly in how to make a vision board.