My Planning system that keeps me going

The centre of my daily planning - My Plum Paper A5 Daily

Something that has really helped me over the past 2 years is having a planning system. Don’t be put off by the word system. It’s not an elaborate scheme involving hundreds of things. It’s just my way of managing my life using my designated planners.

So what do I actually use??

Well there’s three things:

1. My to-do list notepad

2. My Goal setting planner

3. My every day planner (I call this my life planner)

What do each of these do? Let’s find out!

My To do list notepad

It's always good to have a pretty notepad around to catch all those important things.

This is my catch all notepad. It’s a beautiful bright yellow with a bumble bee on the front and it’s where EVERYTHING from my brain gets written down. I don’t worry about the format or how the writing looks and I just focus on clearing my head of tasks. What I like about this notepad is that it’s double sided so I can have on side for the brain dump of tasks and the other for a more streamlined plan of my day. I can then clip these lists into my planner so that I have them all in one place at the start of a new day.

My goal setting planner

My overarching planner for the year is this goal planner by Cultivate What Matters.

This is my year long planner from Cultivate What Matters that helps me to look at the bigger picture and decide what direction I want my year to go in. It launches each year in October and I use November and December to do the prep work and set goals for the next year. Often from one year to the next my big picture goals are similar: something in fitness, something in blogging and career and a few goals connected to my boyfriend, family and friends with creating lasting memories. I then use the monthly pages to remind me of the action steps. These action steps then get transferred into my planner as even smaller mini steps. The Powersheets form one of the integral parts of my planning system. After all how you live your days is how you live your life and it’s important to know what you’re working towards 

My everyday planner

Up to September I was using the Blogilates 2020 Fit planner BUT from October I’ve been using my new Plum Paper A5 Daily planner to add detail and more structure to my daily life. In my every day planner I have my monthly, weekly and daily overviews. This means I can look at the month/week/day and see important things that are coming up ahead of time. I also set up each section in advance. In Jan I set up the perpetual things like birthdays, anniversaries and bank holidays. Then I prep the February overview in the third week January, and March gets prepped in the third week of Feb and so on through the year. For the weekly and daily planning I use my Sunday afternoon planning session to prep these. I spend time mapping out the next week with deadlines and important tasks. Then in the daily section I map out rough tasks and leave space to add things that might come up overnight.

If you fancy seeing a peak of what the inside of the planner looks be sure to check out my YouTube video in the next post :)

Thoughts

I never allow myself to fill in every line ahead of time as it only creates more stress later. Granted some days the section will be full by the time my Sunday planning session is finished but on those days I don’t add anything else to them. I try to keep things as simplified as I can. Planning is about making your life easier! NOT making it more stressful!