Trying to Avoid a Complicated Planner This Year
Maybe it’s time to try for some planner — and life — simplicity
It’s almost the end of the year, which means it’s time to set up the planner for next year.
If you’re a planner geek like me, this is a big deal. I mean, how you set up your planner now sets the tone for the whole year.
Well, not really, but sometimes it feels like it, and there’s a lot of pressure to do it right.
To prepare for this and to help me decide what planner I wanted to use, I made a list of the things I need my planner to do. My planner needs to:
- house my master list of tasks;
- provide weekly and monthly calendars for appointments, birthdays, etc.;
- hold my daily task list;
- have space for notes, lists and thoughts;
- include a place where I can plan my writing time and track the time and word count each day;
- provide a place for me to plan out my goals and projects and the steps needed to achieve them;
- include a place for me to plan out blog and social media content;
- hold my freelance marketing tasks and track writing hours;
- and then whatever else comes to mind.
That’s a tall order for a book that I don’t want to have take up too much space in my purse! My decision was to go with the Bullet Journal precisely because it is so customizable, and really, I haven’t found a planner made specifically for a blogger-freelance writer who works full-time outside the home.
But I need something that will keep me from forgetting things. I have a tendency to let things fall through the cracks because I forget easily. Even if I write them down, I’ll forget to check to see what I should be doing.
So far, nothing has worked, but each year, I get optimistic and try to figure out how this year will be different.
I think my planner obsession and my inability to find something that works is symbolic of our too-busy lives. I can’t imagine this being a problem for any of my ancestors (starting with my parents).
I could opine on why that might be, and how the world has changed so quickly in the last 40 years and it feels like our brains (or at least mine) have not been able to keep up. But I won’t get into that, because we’ll be here all day, and as I said, I have a planner to set up.
The point is, maybe I should replace that planner optimism and overwhelm with simplicity. Instead of trying to get a “system” that works for me, maybe I should just try to do less. Maybe that’ll make my planner easier to set up, as well as my life.
Just something I’ll be pondering as I plan out the pages of my 2018 notebook.
How do you keep your planner from getting overwhelming?
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