My Current Planner Setup.

Hi y'all!

I am back, finally!   Been watching a lot of YouTube and reading blogs and working on my planner and getting stuff done.

Today, I wanted to show you my planner.  This will be a pretty long post I think, so I apologize if it seems to go on forever, but I want to show all the parts of it, and some of the previous month's pages and how I am doing it now. So let's jump into it!

This is my current planner binder. 

PlanAhead Organizer, Small, Black (84962)


I found an awesome deal on Amazon when it was on sale for $7.49 (seriously!)and even came with a full year of undated inserts.  I took those inserts out because I'd already started using the ones I got in my original Day Timer, but since they're undated, I can use them next year.  I put them in a box for safe keeping for now. I really love the binder. It has a snap closure, not just a magnet, which is nice. The cover is nice and.. squishy? I don't know how else to describe it. Puffy maybe? I like it. It's held up really well for me, and the best part is that it only has 3 rings, so all my stuff from my mini home management binder fits right in it without any extra hole punching! It's only $10.97 now, so if you're interested, take a look and click the link above, (it's an affiliate link, fyi) thanks! 

Then we open the planner...


On the left in the pockets I keep stickers, post its, page flags, magnetic place holders, stamps, paper clips, etc.  The big pocket on the left is handy for holding letters I need to mail, or papers from school or anything I need like that. There is a long zipper pocket too. I keep smaller things that I don't want to lose in it.


On the right, in front of my "dashboard"  is a Doctor Who bookmark I just left in the plastic cover it came in, and punched holes for it.  My original planner had 7 rings, so it has extra holes. I just thought the saying about being bigger on the inside fit my planner very well, because by the end of a month it can be really crammed full of stuff.

Then we have my dashboard which is really just the front page lifter.  It has one of my address labels at the top in case the planner gets lost,  and a post it note for quick notes.

The other side has little stacks of post-its and page flags adhered with adhesive roller.

 Next to that is a badge from a convention  my husband and I went to and I slipped a photo of him from the con inside the pocket, added a little washi to be able to punch holes for it and a "my honey" sticker.

Following that, I have several page protectors I got at Staples a while back and had used in my mini home management binder for a while.  I cut paper to fit and adhered photos I had printed at Walgreens.









Then we come to the first tab.  Routines.




There, you will find my morning, before work, and after work routines, and also the weekly home blessing check list.






The Weekly Home Blessing is from FlyLady.

Then I just had some other cleaning notes and holiday prep ideas scribbled in as well as personal info page I won't show. Then we get to  Ideas tab.





This is where I keep paper for jotting down ideas like projects I want to do around the house or things I want to do or places I want to visit, or whatever.  I also keep a goal tracker here that I made myself.  I saw this idea on someone else's blog or youtube, but I am very sorry, I can't recall where. When I made all these things, I didn't think about blogging (or maybe even vlogging) about it, so I didn't take note.

 There's a place for short term, mid term and long term goals, and it unfolds and shows all the months listed and boxes.  One box for each month in short, one per quarter in mid and one big box for long.  I haven't put anything on it yet, but I plan to use it in 2015.


Then I have a Yearly Reference tab.
It's just a piece of cardstock I washied a family photo to the front of and glued the yearly calendar from another planner to the back of...




Then we finally get into the planner guts, the real pages of the thing.  Now I have the inserts that came in my FamilyPlus Daytimer that I got at Walmart.  Fortunately, the holes from that planner actually line up perfectly for this Plan Ahead 3 ring planner perfectly.

I wasn't too thrilled with the weekly pages for this set at first, so I gutted a student planner and used the weeks from that in November as I'll show later on, but I have decided I like the original ones better now and will be going back to those in January.   So, above, you can see the month of October. I went a little crazy with decorating, but it's kind of become a tradition with my months now, since I don't decorate the weeks much anymore.  I have decorated several day pages, but not all. Just whatever I feel like at the time.

I have actually already archived October and November main pages, I took some pics of them anyway to show some examples:

 Above is a week in October.  Some planner folks just use the monthly calendar and then the week on 2 pages is their main planner pages.. but I decided from the beginning that I would be doing a Day on Two pages, so my weeks pages are nothing special. I do put important need-to-remember things on them usually, but I don't always look at my weekly pages. I do put the weather stickers on the days of the week according to the NOAA forecast site.  The weekly pages from this set do have a meal planning area, but in that week, I had messed it all up, so I just made a new one with a notepad for meal planning.  I use those a lot now that I am not using those weekly pages at the moment.

This is what blank ones look like:
Not a lot of room for weekly stuff, but as I said, that's not very important, and I do like the meal planning area.

So, here's a week in November using the new weekly pages I decided I don't like afterall:
They're okay, but for all the hole punching I'd have to do, it's not worth it in the long run.  Trial and error.

And December:

Oh, and take a look at my November and December monthly pages too:

These index cards are for tracking "No Spend November" where I "X" out each day I didn't spend any money outside the budget.  The one on the right is an exercise tracker.  I highlight the days I do any sort of activity, even just walking the dog.  I obviously need to do better there.  I got this idea from the "MyPlanner" YouTube channel.  (See the link and the actual video farther down the page.)


You may notice I have Bible verses written in the dates there.  I'm not going to do that in 2015, as I decided to just add a page per month of the verses (I'm doing the read-the-Bible-in-a-year thing) in my bullet journal - which is a whole other blog (so check back for that soon!)

Before I get ahead of myself, I wanted to mention something else.   Since I have October and November archived in another place outside my planner, I keep the month-on-two-pages calendar for each month and then a couple pages with an index with 1-2 lines per date of what happened each day, usually just the important stuff, so if I need to look back and figure out when something happened, I can just skim through the index pages.  I got this idea (and the way I do a day-on-two-pages) from Patty at Homemakers Daily.   So, here's a quick look at my October and November index pages.  I covered any info I thought may have been too private or about someone else.



Patty's links above really get more in depth, so please check those out if this is something you're interested in doing.  


 Okay, so on to some of the DAY ON TWO PAGES.  These come immediately after the weekly pages.  So you have the month calendar, then the weekly pages, then the days begin.

My first pages were bare and messy, but they were making me so organized, and I was keeping track of things I would have certainly forgotten otherwise.   - Then I started decorating a little...


You can see on the left page, I note the weather, list tasks for the day, there's a place for appointments by time (I don't usually use this a lot, as I don't even work outside the home.  I work from home, so not lots of meetings or anything during the day (and I usually sleep all day anyway, so these times are mostly useless to me) - so I just usually jot down other notes or reminders.

The right page is for journaling about the day. I try to keep it concise and separate each thing, but lately, it's starting to look like I'm writing a book.  I need to ease back a little on my journaling, and keep it so I can find things quickly.  Indexing December will not be easy otherwise. 

So, here's another day. I like washi tape. :)

The holidays were fun:

I haven't had so much fun with stickers since I was like 10 years old?  LOL
 I cut up a thanksgiving card I got from my car insurance agent LOL.
I didn't journal at all on this day as I was spending all my time with family, as it should be.

I do have my to-do pages I made for the day-before-Thanksgiving though. They are paperclipped into that day.

The day-on-two pages inserts I used for October and November were from a pack I bought from the daytimer site.  They were undated pages, 2 months worth for like $7.99.  I decided to try that and see if it worked for me.   I did like them a lot, and would have just gotten more, but then I saw a video...




I just LOVED her daily pages!  I decided to at least give them a try. So I ordered the printable on Etsy from RogueCrusade, which was super cheap, and figured out how to print them, then punched out enough for a month. Printing them on one side only was perfect, because that allowed me to use the back side of the next day as the journaling page.  See:



My handwriting is getting neater.  I am actively working on it!  But yeah these journaling pages are a mess with no division of thoughts.  I guess it's because they are unlined pages. I will have to make more of an effort to make sure to space stuff out and divide things or as I said, going back and indexing December will be very hard.

Here's a blank one:
I really love them. I started out copying what Vienna from MyPlanner did in her video, even down to the eat clean and drink more water thing... which I happen to be doing, so yay!  But now that's I've been in them about a week, I'm getting more familiar with them, decided what's important - like right now, it's to get back into doing my morning routine EVERY day and try to get the other routines done too, but to really work on the morning one, so I put that reminder in there.

Oh that reminds me, I am sort of doing a "31 days of..." thing.  It's the 31 Days of Merriment and Cheer from Alexis at MissTrenchcoat and her Strange & Charmed blog.  I'm not doing them in order, because some are kind of specific, like go on an outdoor adventure (I can't do that if it's raining or I have 15 people in my house, etc.).  Today I chose, "Drink a hot chocolate". So, I had a big mug of it while I watched Elementary on demand with my husband.


Okay, so after all the daily pages, are the tabs for next year I still have in here.  It's just the monthly calendars.  I have the weekly pages in storage since they can take up a bit of space, and I don't have much space to give in this planner since I'm doing DOTP.


Then there's A-Z contacts pages, which I do use quite a bit. I have a phone of course, but I like writing letters, and of course we send out Christmas cards etc, so I keep numbers and addresses in here. It's just easier and more reliable than my phone.  My phone is crap.



Then I have a tab for Important Information where I keep website passwords, personal info, account numbers, that sort of thing.

Then I have a Shopping tab.

Behind it, I track online orders and what I have already gotten for people for Christmas (or birthday etc).

Then I have a small financial section where I track how we're doing on our $1000 Emergency Fund (not terribly great since hubby's still unemployed unfortunately), and also the 52 week savings plan...
My printer was out of ink when I decided to do this, so I just made my own.  Basically, you save a number of dollars equal to which week you're on and add it to the rest.  So, week 1, you'd tuck $1 away (I used a bank envelope in my desk), then week two, you'd add 2 more dollars for a total of 3, and so on. Just mark off or highlight the weeks you've done.  By the end, you'll have $1378 (or a little less if you use it for Christmas shopping which is kind of the idea I think).  I think it's awesome, and I had started doing it before my husband lost his job, so I have since stopped.  I am going to try to restart with January 2015 so I can go by the actual weeks of the year. I'll just re-use this page for it.

The next page is this awesome bill schedule.
 I saw something similar on another blog or youtube, and I googled annual bill schedule, and there it was. It's at Organizing Home Life.  I sized it to fit in my planner and I have one for the rest of 2014 and a new one ready for 2015.  I don't have all our bills on there yet, but it'll all be filled out and ready by Jan 1.  It's just a handy quick reference to see if I have paid something or not, and see if we're falling behind on anything or if something is upcoming in case I don't have my big financial binder with me.

Then in the back, I just have a zipper pouch with thank you cards and get well cards etc and some stickers and photos.




My back page lifter is just the back of the student planner I took apart to use the weekly inserts from.  just hole punched it to fit, and it works great.

There's a notepad on the inside back cover that lined on both sides and pre-punched, so they can go right into the planner.


And that's it really.  This post was probably really chaotic and all over the place, but I hope I got the ideas across.  I do want to mention, in addition to this planner, I do also use a bullet journal.  This planner is kind of HUGE even when it doesn't have a month of stuff in it.  It's just how it is with planners this size. In filofax it would be like an A5.  The pages are half the size of a regular sheet of paper, so like 5.5 x 8.5.   My bullet journal isn't tiny, but it's small enough I can put it into my purse and grab it quickly if I need to for my grocery list or list of errands or whatever.   I have loads to say about bullet journals, so check that post out which should be up soon.

Thanks for coming by my blog today!  If you have any questions or comments leave them below!  Have a great day!

Patty




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