A hyperlinked planner is a PDF with a navigation layer on top. Tap a tab and you land on the right page, with no scrolling and no thumbnail hunting. GoodNotes 6 handles that layer well, but only if you import the file the right way and know about one setting that catches almost everyone out.
This is the setup we recommend to members, in the order we would do it ourselves.
Import the PDF
Open GoodNotes, tap the plus button in your library and choose Import. Pick the planner PDF you downloaded from the vault. GoodNotes keeps the hyperlinks intact as long as you import the original file rather than a screenshot or a re-exported copy.
That caveat matters more than it sounds. If you open the PDF in another app first and use a share sheet to send it across, some apps flatten the file on the way. What arrives looks identical and has no working links. The symptom is always the same: the tabs are visible, they just do nothing. If that happens, delete the document and import the original file again.
Give a large planner a moment to land. The 214-page Undated Weekly takes around ten seconds on a recent iPad, and a little longer if iCloud is still pulling the file down.
Switch to read-only for navigation
Here is the setting that decides whether the planner feels good or infuriating.
Hyperlinks in GoodNotes only fire when the pen tool is off. With a pen or highlighter selected, tapping a tab draws a small mark instead of navigating. People conclude the links are broken, when in fact the app is doing exactly what it was told.
The quickest habit is to tap the read-only toggle in the top toolbar, jump to the page you need, then switch back to write. Two taps, and it becomes automatic within a day.
Tip. Set GoodNotes to open new documents in read-only under Settings, Document Editing. You will never draw on a tab by accident again, and writing is still one tap away.
Members who plan on the same three pages a day tend to leave the document in read-only permanently and use the Apple Pencil double-tap gesture to flip into the pen when they actually want to write.
Use the side tabs
Every page in our planners carries the same four tabs down the left: Day, Week, Month and Notes. They are always in the same place, which is the whole point. Your thumb learns where Month is and stops reading the labels.
The links run in both directions. The month grid links each date to the week it belongs to, and each week links back to its month. Notes pages are grouped by month rather than dumped at the end, so the notes you took in March are one tap from March.
You should never need the page thumbnail strip. If you find yourself opening it, something has gone wrong with the import.
On the iPad 4:3 export the tabs are wider and sit inside the safe area, so they stay reachable in Split View with a browser beside them. On the A4 and Letter exports the tabs are narrower, because those files are shaped for printing and a wide rail wastes paper.
Duplicate a week without breaking links
Undated planners give you 52 weekly spreads. Most people never run out. If you do, duplicate a page rather than starting a new document.
Open the thumbnail view, find an empty week, and duplicate that one. Duplicating a filled week copies your handwriting too, which is rarely what you want, and then you spend ten minutes erasing.
Links on a duplicated page still point at the original month and notes pages. That is usually correct: the new week belongs to the same month. If it does not, the tab still lands somewhere sensible rather than failing.
Avoid the Copy Page to Another Document option. That path flattens hyperlinks in every version of GoodNotes we have tested, and the copy arrives with dead tabs. If you need a page in a second document, import the original PDF there instead and delete what you do not need.
There is one more duplication case worth covering: adding a month to a dated file. Dated planners in the vault run to a fixed end date, and when you reach it the answer is a new file rather than a duplicated page, because the printed dates on a duplicate would be wrong. Undated files never hit this, which is most of why we build them that way.
Keep it in sync
Turn on iCloud sync in GoodNotes so the same planner opens on your iPhone. Handwriting and links carry across, and the phone is genuinely useful for the Notes pages even if the weekly spread is cramped.
When a new drop lands in the vault, import it as a fresh document rather than replacing the old one. GoodNotes has no concept of updating a PDF in place, so replacing means losing everything you wrote. Keeping both costs a little storage and nothing else.
One last habit worth building: rename the document to the year or the date you started it. Six months in, "Undated Weekly" and "Undated Weekly 2" are not helpful, and GoodNotes sorts by name more often than you expect.
That is the whole setup. Import the original, plan in read-only, navigate with the tabs, duplicate empty pages only, and import new drops alongside the old ones. Everything else is just writing.