Currently Planning…

I love a good planner. I love a monthly spread, a weekly spread, a daily spread. I love markers and pens. I love stickers and washi tape. I love to-do lists and meal planning.

Planning is my jam.

But when my work schedule is normal and school is in session, I haven’t been able to make fun planning work for me. I have too many meetings and tasks and REAL stuff to leave much room for the fun parts of planning. Plus, I’ve never been able to figure out how to make things look pretty and be functional at the same time.

This is how my functional calendar usually looked when I was working for ClassMax only and traveling my ass off. I used a daily calendar and it basically just told me which city I was in that day and what my meetings were. Nothing glamorous here.

When I went back into a school again, my scheduling changed a bit. I wasn’t so focused on meetings as I was on tasks and to-do’s. But, again, nothing glamorous in the planning department going on…

So when Covid happened and I found myself at home more, I decided to try something new and fun with my planner. Mostly because I had the time now, but also because it made me feel like I had some kind of control over the chaos that was quarantine. Even if nothing on my calendar was actually important, the act of spending time in my planner every day helped me feel like there was routine going on in my life and that helped my stress and anxiety tremendously.

Every morning, I would go for my walk, take a shower and get ready for the day, do my Bible study, and then spend some time in my planner. Those same activities, every single day, gave me stability. It’s been months now and I still have that same morning routine. In fact, as we get closer to school starting back (in whatever form that is going to look like), I have pledged to myself to make time for those routines no matter what.

Part of that routine has been indulging in some fun planning to take the place of the more practical planning my normal life requires. And you know what? I’m kind of loving it! I’ve only started this in July, so I haven’t been doing much of it yet, but so far it gives me a little creative fun in my day, while still helping keep me on task and productive – a win/win!

This was my planner spread for the first week of July, when I started in my new planner. I switched over to a Happy Planner with a vertical layout because I had more of a need for to-do lists than appointments. (I’ve grayed out areas for business privacy, by the way…).

This is the left sidebar:

For the first week of July, I used this as a meal planning area. It worked great, except I felt like the space was kind of wasted. For the second week of July, I’m using the sidebar for my master to-do list instead.

In the top boxes of this week’s spread, I put in my exercise tracking:

But after using this for a week, I realized that I was wasting space here, too. In my second week in July, I only used a small area of my daily boxes for exercise tracking instead and I’m liking that much more.

In my first week of planning, I put my scheduled appointments and meetings in the bottom segment of the planner and used the middle section for my to-do list. I liked having both these sections, but I felt like the order was hard to use. I really needed to see the daily meetings and appointments first so that I could plan everything around those, instead of having it at the end of the day. For this specific week, you can see that I had a workshop series I was leading virtually for a school district and my session dates and times are listed at the bottom of each day.

Later in the week, I didn’t have many scheduled appointments, but I did have large blocks of time for either fun things or blocks of time for project work.

I was able to put a few more fun things on this side of the spread because my days were much more flexible at the end of the week. A few things to note about some things on my calendar:

• My Bible study group is virtual. 🙂
• Our family watched Hamilton together on Friday and it was everything I’d dreamed it would be. Can someone please tell me how you make it through the “It’s Quiet Uptown” scene without your entire heart breaking in two???
• On the 4th of July, I actually went in for Covid testing that morning, so we basically cancelled everything on Saturday and Sunday (and Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday…) until I get my results back. Oy vey.

So, that’s what my calendar ended up looking like after the first week of using fun things in my planner. For the second week in July (which we are currently in and, as of writing this, I haven’t even started yet), I tried some new things based on what I learned in the first week.

First, I changed the use of my sidebar. I realized I needed one big, master to-do list for the week that I could then move into individual days to complete. But I needed a brain dump place first. So, I turned my sidebar into my brain dump. This was really helpful because I could add to this sidebar before the week even started, making sure I had a place to write things as I thought of them, even if I wasn’t ready to commit to a specific day yet in my schedule. I also added chores that I know I need to get done next week. (You can see that core list in the picture above.)

I also decided to change out how I use the boxes this week. I knew I wanted to use the top boxes for appointments and specific events with times. I don’t have much of that going on this week, which was nice. I also decided to use the middle boxes as my daily to-do list. I sat down on Sunday afternoon and took my brain dump list and organized it into days and chunks of time to get things done.

You can also see that Chris’s birthday is this Wednesday! Yay! Happy birthday, Chris! I moved my appointment for that day down a bit since I had decorations for his birthday. Also, for those of you as nosey as I am when I look at people’s calendars, Crave is a non-profit foundation here in Orlando that I serve on the board of, in case you were wondering. It’s a new position for me, so I’m sure I’ll share more about it as I get more involved.

The second part of my week works that same way in these top two boxes. But you can see that on Friday, I am wishing and hoping and thinking and praying that my Covid test will be negative and I can go to the beach. Wishful thinking, maybe, but I put it on my calendar anyway.

In the bottom boxes of each day, I split the box into two. One is for my meal planning and one is for my workout tracker. This seemed like a much more practical use of real estate in my planner than the week before when I used a third of the day for exercise and my entire sidebar for meal planning!

I’ve decided this school year to use a separate planner for school planning. Mostly because everywhere I go on campus, I need to have testing dates and information handy and it’s easier if those are on their own calendar. Plus, I don’t want to carry a planner back and forth to home and work. So this one will stay at home and will include our family activities and my ClassMax and freelance work, which my work one will stay in my office and cover my day-to-day on campus.

So, that’s what’s keeping my life sane and helping me pretend things are normal. Who knows if I’ll be able to keep this going when real life starts back again. But I hope I do.

What about you? How do you plan? Do you like seeing MY planning? Is that something you’d like to see more of in my blog (not weekly or anything because I’m way too much of a slacker blogger for that…)?