Plans, Planning and Planners

Planners

Planners have been a part of my life since the 1980's, I swear.  The first one I remember being A Thing was either the original Day Runner or the original Day Timer, I don't remember which.  They set up a stand in the local stationary store to show off the latest thing.  It came with six ring binders that looked like this:

But that came in the various Kontry shades of dusty rose, dusty blue and dusty grey that were popular with the wimmins of the day.  Given that I recall not only the usual inserts of monthly calender, meeting tracking, financial records and an auto log, but also a diet tracker, an exercise tracker, a packing list and so on, all printed in pink, I assume now it was aimed at the newly divorced housewife going back to work as a secretary, or the Perminatly Single working woman whacking herself against the glass ceiling, or something like that.  You know, these ladies.

I think my Nanny bought it for me in the vain hope that it would help me get my homework done.  It didn't.  I had no clue what I was doing, and I was trying to cram 28 hours into every 24, which wouldn't work if I did.

I remember looking for help with time management throughout high school and college. Apparently everyone around me somehow absorbed it from the ether.  The only written advice I could find was aimed at executives, as were the planners avaliable once they stopped publishing the dusty rose monstrosity.  Seriously, those six ring binders were heavy.

Executive planners.  Franklyn Covey is a good example.

 

A layout that never did work for me, in colors that made it hard to read the page, and paper that couldn't be used for anything else or indexed well.  My Aunt gave me one of those heavy binders in 8.5x11 size, so at least I could use binder paper.  It lasted three months before dying in my car fire.  I never could figure out how to get them to work for a college student, or for a temp worker, which I was for a few years. 

During that time I tried Filofax, another gift from Nanny

The pages were neat and tidy and elegant.  And more than that, you could get paper in different colort.  But it wasn't popular in the US outside of major cities, and it was hard to order inserts (this was before the internet y'all), so I either had to go to the one tiny shop that imported inserts and hope they had something or go to San Francisco.  It did not last.

Once I started teaching I actually had a schedule that needed to get that granular.  I also realized by then that I needed color to keep me organized.  I finally settled on this beast.

Which had just enough visual going on to keep me focused and let me schedule in classes and meetings.  It wasn't good for anything else but at the time I didn't need anything else.  QuickNotes by At A Glance kept me going for ten years.

And then I retired and became a homemaker.  By then the internet was a thing, so I set out to do some research on how to organize a home.  And that was how I discovered Dominionisim.  Seriously, the only people writing about home orgainzation back in the early 2000's were Exceedingly Christian Homeschoolers with lots and lots of kids.  And since I didn't need a section on prayers, or testing, or keeping track of ten loads of laundry a day, it never seemed quite applicable.  But it was the only community at the time keeping track of homemaker stuff out there.

I bonked around for a while, setting up a binder, deciding it was too thick and not useful, switcing to a half size for being portable, switching to digital when I got my first iPad, switching back to paper when an app I was using upgraded to a pay-to-use format and so on.  Trello and Evernote were big for a while. And I read Home Comforts and the Fly Lady and there was always Martha to glean something from, and so on.

And then planning and planners became A Thing.  Bullet Journaling took the world by storm, followed quickly by Traveler's Notebooks.  It seems like the intersection of some actually useful ideas with scrapbooking.  Really pretty, really busy, really frilly scrapbooking.

Now I love some pretty frills, but I am not a scrapbooker.  I've found that the best parts of my life tend to be the day-to-day times, unimpressive days that don't come with lots of pictures and scraps of bits.  I don't have a lot of ephemera to save and while lots of stickers and washi tape can be pretty to look at I personally find too much to be distracting.  And I need to be able to move things around easily, I like to have my weekly notes, my daily to-dos, my current patterns and tonights recipe all in the same place.   So a Traveler's Notebook is not for me.  A binder seems to suit me fine.  But at the same time I like the more substantial feel of some of the Traveler's inserts, and that they do not ghost through the pages, and they feel like they can be archived.

So these days I still use a binder, but I load it with cardstock for my weekly notes.  I get colored filler paper to help me keep things organized.  In some cases I punch holes in legal pads to use as another color.  For my sections I have:

- A montly calender, where I track my projects.

- A weekly spread where I get an idea of what I'm doing on which day.  This is what I decorate, if anything.

- A daily list where I set out what I need to do step by step, so I can put in headphones and just go

- Leger pages, on yellow paper, where I keep track of spending and finances

- Notes for the monthly holiday, which I will talk about in more depth soon, on holiday paper

- A health section, where I currently keep notes from Physical therapy, and the dentist, and my current DEXA scan

- A food section, where I keep my Master Grocery List, what recipies are currently in rotation, and some basic kitchen notes.

- A reading & writing section, where I keep my story notes and a list of books I want to read.

- A projects section, where I keep notes on any current crafting projects, patters, what I have stored where, and so on.

- And finally a general section, where I put any random notes that dom't fit anywhere else.  At the moment the top page in there is a set of family trees for the Netflix series Dark, which is moody and complex and needs notes to keep track of who is related to/married to/fucking whom.

And I keep some things digital.  Google Calender for appointments because I can share with Kitty.  MyFitnessPal to track my diet.  Glucose Companion for my blood sugar readings because I can share with my doctor.  I have a TV show tracker I keep digitally, and Knit Companion for knitting patterns because it's portable.  So I use a hybred system.

I might go into some of this more in-depth later.  If anyone wants me to go into anything specifically please let me know.