I LOVE Planners

I love planners.  Not just calendars, but really cool planners.  I can't keep a million details in my brain without  either losing some or cranking my anxiety through the roof.  Or both.  So a planner is a luxury I can't live without.

And luxury it is.  The planners I love are around $30 per year.  Mark rolls his eyes at the expense.  But when I don't have a good planner I really feel like I am losing out.

I use my planners to get a grip on all the various data that is flying past me; dates with family or business engagements, deadlines for school events or plans that Mark has made that I'll forget about if I don't get it in my book.  I keep an online calendar as well so Mark and I can share one real time calendar and see what's coming.  I'm sure the redundancy of two calendars might bother some, but for me writing things in my planner serves to incorporate them into my day/week/month of to dos and shopping lists and ongoing projects.

My planners also serve as historical reference. When we moved last fall I packed a box of various mementos--photos, baby hats, foot prints-- and also my planers from the last 14 years.  I kid you not.  I still have planners from high school.  I love looking back and reading notes about Mark and I dating, the excitement of graduation, and the thrill of living alone like a real adult!!  I love looking back to my planner from 2009 as I made notes about Will's development and personality as a baby, and my 2011 planner as I made notes about my pregnancy with Jack.  I don't journal very consistently, or log very consistently for that matter; but I'm usually about to jot down a few sentences about baby antics.

I have had various actual planners over the years.  I loved the BusyBodyBook but it went out of production (WHY OH GOD WHY?!?!).  I tried another planner that used a funneling system to organize projects, to tasks, to appointments, it was neat, but I didn't really stick with it. At this moment I'm using a format I developed to try to keep the day in order.  It looks something like this:

But I haven't found a really good way to print/bind it, and grappling with pagination and formatting to get it ready for a printer has made me crazy.  So for now I am just writing it by hand each day.  But it's helping.  It's getting what I need down on paper and out of my head.