I’m more than a little obsessed with planners. Anything that might give me the illusion of control over my life, I’ll sign up for and throw money at, no questions asked. I have been messing around with planners, starting but never finishing them for ages. I keep giving up because I’m not consistent and then I feel discouraged by all those blank pages I never filled out.
However, that’s all changed in the last year for me. I am nearing the end of my undated Passion Planner weekly that I started last summer, and I’m thrilled to report that all but two weeks of the entire year have something written on them.
Being consistent with my planner seems a little bit like magic. All those years I struggled and threw away only 40%-completed planners. What’s different now? I learned three major things as I developed into One Who Completes Planners:
1. Find something that works for your real life
2. Make it part of your daily ritual
3. Different Purposes sometimes require different planners
Play Around with Formats
There are tons of options for planners. If you’re a stationery nerd like myself, you’re obsessed with all the pretty pens and highlighters and washi tape and stickers. Unfortunately, my life is just too busy to decorate a planner from top to bottom every day or week. It’s too much pressure. Once I let go of the feeling that I ought to be like all the Instagrammers who have these beautiful layouts, I started relaxing into what worked best for me.
You have to kiss a lot of frogs in the planner world. Each planner type is pretty and new and shiny, full of the promise of a wonderfully organized life. As you begin to use it, however, it soon becomes clear what works for you and what doesn’t. I need a place to write my appointments as well as a place for to-do lists and priorities. It’s nice to have a place for dinner, my cleaning focus, and gratitude for the day too. It’s hard to find everything you want in a planner that also has a form factor that works for you.
Digital planning opens a whole new world of options. If you have an iPad, especially, the options are staggering. Digital stickers are a fun rabbit hole to fall down. There’s something appealing about always having access to your planner everywhere you go because it’s on the device you’re already carrying with you and not an additional book that you have to lug around.
I tried digital planning and it’s wonderful, but ultimately not for me. An important factor in the success of planners in my life is that they provide a moment of peace and calm as I sort out all the to-dos and the events across all the calendars. Writing it by hand on paper helps me to keep it all straight in my mind and provides stress relief. Good paper and an excellent pen are essential for this meditative effect of planning to work.
Important note: It’s ok to abandon a planner that isn’t working for you just because you spent money on it. If you can’t afford a new one just now or want to be more sure before you purchase, many of these companies offer a free download of their planner pages so that you can try it out for a little while by printing copies to make sure it’s the one for you. People post their spreads on Instagram and elsewhere on the internet if you’d like to see some real-life examples of the pages in action.
Make it a Ritual
Pulling out my planner and grabbing my favorite pen is a signal to my mind that it’s time to pull all the worries floating around in my brain out and onto paper where I can track them, catalog them, and place them into time slots. As someone who has trouble with anxiety and panic attacks sometimes, I can tell you that this time with my planner is instrumental in my ongoing mental well-being. I am able to see that I am making progress as I check things off, which helps my anxiety almost as much as making the lists in the first place.
I plan in the morning. I get up at a different time than the rest of my family. I’m lucky enough to get an extra half hour of sleep on workdays. During the summer it still works out because my teenager sleeps late. My mornings are sacred to me! I protect this time and everyone knows that I need this time, even on weekends.
I always have my iced coffee (yes, year-round!) with me and I sit down with my planner and get to work figuring out what I want to do with this day and/or week. I look at how the previous days have gone, what has been overlooked, and re-evaluated the priorities that I picked on Sunday/Monday.
This time is so precious to me, I can’t imagine ever wanting to give up my planner time to do something else. If I get interrupted, I tend to get a little crabby. Luckily my family has a lot of patience with my quirky ways.
Important note: There’s no rule that says you have to do this in the morning. Are you chasing around littles or frantic getting to work? Do your planner time at night, or even on your lunch break. The key here is to make it a ritual—at a time and place that works for you.
It’s OK to Have More than One
You will probably have to try different planners to find one that fits your style, but you might also discover that you need different planners for different purposes. If adding another planner feels overwhelming, don’t do it! But if you’re like me, someone who fell in love with her Passion Planner Weekly, you discover that this planner is fulfilling important needs, but that you also have other needs that need to be addressed. That’s why I also have a daily planner. At the beginning of the week, I fill into my Passion Planner everything that I know in advance that’s going to happen or needs to happen this week. I map out all my appointments and where I have to be and when. I list down the absolute must-happen to-dos.
But it’s not quite enough. On a Wednesday, things might completely fall apart. The thing that was supposed to happen gets moved or I’m sick or life just happens to interrupt the plan. I don’t want to go into my weekly planner to change things around too much, because it just gets messy. The weekly planner is my projection of what I think can and should happen this week.
The daily planner is where those days that are crazy get mapped out. I don’t fill out a daily planner every single day, because some days just aren’t that complicated. But on days when I have a lot to do or if I’m feeling stressed, I use the daily planner to map out how that day should go based on the current reality that I didn’t know about at the beginning of the week.
I like to have priority tasks—if I finish these, I’ve “won the day.” I know that whatever else happens, I am a success today because those things got done. I make sure that they’re not all from the same category. There might be a work thing, a personal life thing, and a family/friend thing on that list. It’s important not to focus so much on one area of life that the others suffer. When I notice my work to-dos taking over my planner, I make a conscious effort to put friends, family, and personal goals back on those lists. Balance is critical to avoiding burnout.
Planners that Might Be for You
Here are some planners that I’ve tried and liked (even if I’m not still using them). Most have weekly planners, and some also offer daily planners:
- Day Designer (I used the Blue Sky version which is a lower cost to try out the format. Get the real deal if you’re looking for high-end paper and binding)
- Simplified Planner by Emily Ley