Planner anxiety, planner stress, planner pressure… We all hate it!
We watch too many YouTube-videos and they make us want to go all perfect. The prettiest stickers, the loveliest washi and Frixions only – god forbid we would scratch something out!
I am a perfect example of Planner Peer Pressure, and until recently I was a Frixion-only girl that would go back and fill in appointments and tasks for days, or sometimes weeks passed, because I couldn’t bear the sight of empty pages. They made me feel… Boring, or inadequate, or… I don’t know.
Juggling with set-ups and inserts and trying to find ‘my’ system, I recently (aka in April or something) managed to set my A5 up in the ‘perfect’ way for me. I haven’t changed anything since, and that is a first for me.
But carrying that heavy planner around in my handbag was just silly, so after months of screaming that personal size was not for me, I caved and went ‘back’ to personal. I double now: personal in my handbag, A5 at home and at work on my desk.
OK, so that was that. Personal in the handbag it is. But wait – what inserts will I use? Agh. On came the planner pressure again.
I fiddled around with printables to see what worked, and tried three or four calendars at once to see what I used and what remained untouched.
So far, I found out:
- I need a Mo2P for a general overview.
- I need a Wo2P (cotton cream with equal weekend spacing, thank you Karen!) for weekly appointment planning
- I need some form of daily notes & tracking but the Wo2P is too small to include that as well.
Kim was so kind to send me a Do2P from Day Runner to try out. I LOVE the space it gives me, but I can’t work with the pre-printed hours: my day ends at about 11PM and the pages only go until 5PM. I’ve been using the notes page for the extra hours, but most of the times, my evenings are more filled up than the day is. So I need a fix for that.
Also, I only use the Do2P during the week. It does not get used on the weekends. Not at all. There, my Wo2P is enough. If there are free days during the week, I’m pretty sure I won’t be using them either.
Thèn… Jhosie shared the Patrick Ng Chronodex-templates on her blog and, well, I fell in love with them. I’m a chaotic, visual person and I immediately saw what benefits it could have for me. So I printed out Jhosie’s papers and the Patrick Ng ones as well, to see which ones I like. I will start using them over the weekend.
I will use them as Do2P: Chronodex on the left, blank page on the right, for scribbles, to-do lists, post-its, … By using blank templates (no dates mentioned), I can just use one when I feel the need to. Every workday? Only Tuesdays and Fridays? Who cares. No white pages, no planner-pressure, just a clear, visual solution when I feel I need extra room for planning and notes.
Does anyone else use this flexible system of just taking a planner page when you need one, rather than using one every day by default?
PS: No more Frixions, either. Coleto FTW!
MellaMania 