About · Ottawa, Ontario · since 2016
About Tooranceat
We develop and publish free digital resources for planning, organisation and everyday workflows — tools, templates, printables and written guides — for individuals, families, students and working teams. The catalogue is maintained by a small editorial team in Ottawa and has been free, without accounts, since the day it was published.
62 records6 staff published in English and, progressively, in French
Mission
Why this exists
To make practical planning material available to anyone who needs it, at no cost and without conditions, and to keep it accurate for as long as it stays published.
Planning material is not scarce. Good planning material, free of charge, that assumes an ordinary life — irregular hours, shared households, limited printing, competing obligations — is much harder to find. Most of what exists is either a sample page attached to a subscription, or advice with no sheet to act on it.
We are trying to occupy the gap: a maintained catalogue where each resource states what it is for, admits where it stops working, and can be printed on a library printer without consuming a cartridge. The work is unglamorous and mostly consists of revision. That is the point.
In numbers
62
Published records
18
Months maximum before review
0
Paid tiers, ever
How we got here
2016 – 2026
- 2016
Founded in Ottawa
Tooranceat began as a set of shared planning sheets made for a single adult-learning programme in Ottawa, after its coordinators could not find printable material that assumed a learner with irregular hours. Eleven sheets, one printer, no website.
- 2018
First public catalogue
The sheets were published openly after two years of requests from other programmes. The decision to keep everything free and account-free was made at this point and has not been revisited.
- 2020
Household and remote-work material
Demand shifted sharply towards household planning and home-office routines. We added the household planner, the shared task rotation and the first version of the weekly schedule with energy bands.
- 2022
Editorial standards written down
As the catalogue passed forty records, we formalised the review process: named authors, a second reviewer, a last-reviewed date on every document, and a rule that anything unreviewed for eighteen months is revised or withdrawn.
- 2024
Identifiers and revision numbers
Every record received a permanent identifier and a revision number, so people could tell whether a file they had saved was still the current one. Teams had been circulating five different versions of the same agenda sheet.
- 2026
Catalogue rebuilt around collections
The site was restructured into six collections with a searchable directory, a release log and a full accessibility review. Sixty-two records are currently published and maintained.
Editorial standards
Six ruleswritten down in 2022
These are the rules we apply before anything is published or revised. They are deliberately boring, and they are the reason the catalogue can be trusted to be current.
Named authorship
Every guide is drafted by one person and reviewed by a second. Both are recorded internally, and the reviewer's initials appear on the record. Nothing is published anonymously.
Tested against the sheet
A guide that describes a method is checked against the template it refers to. If the guide says four sections and the sheet has three, the guide does not ship.
Dated and expiring
Every document carries a last-reviewed date. Anything unreviewed for eighteen months is revised or withdrawn. We would rather have a smaller catalogue than a stale one.
Specific over popular
We do not publish on a topic because it attracts readers. If we cannot say something specific and practical, and give you a sheet to act on it, we leave the topic alone.
Evidence described honestly
Where we cite a pattern from our own logs, we say what we measured and how many people it covered. Where something is our opinion, it is written as our opinion.
Corrections in public
Errors are corrected in the release log with a description of what was wrong, not folded into a general improvements line. Structural changes are always named.
Development philosophy
How we build
Free means free
No account, no email capture, no trial tier, no better version held back. Free that requires an address is a price with extra steps.
Print is a first-class output
Every printable is tested on ordinary home and office printers, in A4 and Letter, with ink-light versions for long runs. A planner that only works on a screen fails the people who most need it.
Constraints on purpose
Six items, not twenty. Three goals, not ten. Most of our design work is deciding what a sheet will refuse to hold.
Legible without us
A completed sheet should make sense to someone who has never seen our guidance. The record is for the reader, not for the system.
Slow additions, faster removals
We add a small number of records each month and withdraw anything that no longer earns its place. A catalogue is only useful if you can find things in it.
No dark patterns, no advertising
We do not run ads, sell data, use behavioural profiling, or design a single interaction to be harder to leave than to enter.
The team
Six peopleOttawa and remote
Marguerite Halloran
Director, editorial standards
Leads the review process and holds final sign-off on every guide. Previously spent eleven years designing training material for public-sector operations teams in Ontario.
Devraj Anand
Lead, tools and templates
Designs the layouts and tests every printable across a deliberately unglamorous set of home and office printers. Background in information design and technical documentation.
Claire Bouchard
Editor, planning systems
Writes and maintains the long-form planning guides. Trained as a secondary-school teacher and still runs planning workshops for students twice a year.
Owen Tsatsos
Accessibility and front-end
Responsible for keyboard navigation, contrast, screen-reader behaviour and the print quality of every PDF we publish.
Priya Raghunathan
Community and correspondence
Reads everything that arrives in the inbox, and turns recurring requests into the list that shapes each month's release.
Simon Lafrenière
Research and review
Checks that our guidance still matches current practice, and retires material that no longer earns its place.
How the work is funded
Plainly stated
We are asked this often, and the answer should be easy to find. Tooranceat is funded by paid consulting and workshop work carried out separately by the same team — planning and documentation projects for organisations that can pay for them — together with a small number of unrestricted grants from Canadian foundations supporting adult and community learning.
None of that funding buys placement, influences what we publish, or attaches conditions to the catalogue. We do not run advertising, we do not accept sponsored resources, and we do not sell data. If that ever changes, it will be stated on this page before it happens, not after.