If you follow me on Instagram, you can see I recently bought Brit Poe’s Thriving Scribes Planner (check out her website—she also sells a PDF version of her planner, if you are interested).
You will also know that I talk about my Passion Planner, as well as my A5 Stalogy.
What sort of system do I use exactly? And how do I use it?
First, let me backtrack a little bit, back to the beginning of this year. It is only my second year using a Passion Planner planner. Last year, I sta5rted out with a medium undated weekly planner to see how I felt about them. I’ve been looking for something specific in a planner, but I can’t really tell you what that was at this point.
So as soon as I was able last year, I ordered a medium dated weekly planner…and have been happily using that to plan and sometimes to track food intake, sometimes to track other things—it has been a hard year for me to keep up with myself, all around, pandemic or not. While using that planner, I also kept a separate journal where I wrote my ‘morning pages’, or whatever else I wanted to write. In my purse, I still carry a journal for the scribbling of notes and ideas and whatnot that I carry over to my main planner/journal, depending on what I wrote and where it needs to go.
Now, this April (I think) my youngest watched some YouTube videos with me and one of them was a Passion Planner video. I don’t remember which one, but it was talking about using your planner to help your anxiety. Our son has some issues with anxiety, made hella worse by the pandemic, and so I bought him a large undated weekly planner. I usually get his input on how to set things up, but other than flipping through it, he’s not using it all that much … yet … I’m still working on that…he’s 8…we’re getting there. When I ordered his planner, I ordered a full year of Passion Planners daily planners. One of these planners lasts for three months. The past couple of years I have gone nuts about October wanting to buy a new planner for the next year and being totally unable to buy one (unless I wanted to buy an undated planner) … so I wanted to be certain that I had my planners on hand…and I have been anxious to try the daily planner as well.
Now enter OneBookJuly. How do I get everything I want into one journal? For July—that’s not hard. Even though I kept my Passion Planner—I think I was tracking just food logs at that point—and fluid intake as well.
I had read Ryder Carroll’s book the year before, along with the rest of the OneBookJuly community…but the symbols and the leave out all detail/strip it all back thing…it doesn’t work for me. So I sort of set it aside.
Somewhere in between all of that, with the help of YouTube suggesting videos, I started to catch various plan with me videos here and there. I’d watch and not think much of it…and then something in my brain clicked. (Thank you, Daksina.)
At this point, I had ordered my Hobonichi Techo Cousin…and Daksina is where I first heard about Stalogy…and I started to watch even more planner videos…especially the more artistic ones. For June, July and August, I have two journals that I used as basically all-in-one journals, planning, memory keeping, diary, all of it…there you go…at the beginning of September I began to use my Stalogy. I joined several planner groups on Facebook. I follow a ton of planners on…every social outlet I use (YouTuber, Instagram, Pinterest…).
Some days I look at this planner community and I think, OMG, I joined the mixed media art community and I should have joined a planner community far far sooner. It’s October and so many people are showing off their planners for next year already. Hobonichi unboxings…travelers notebooks…stickers…and so many other things…oh my… Why did no one tell me about a planning community these past 2-3 years when I have been going nuts looking for a dated planner? Ahhh…
So here I am, currently. I am using my Passion Planner medium weekly dated planner—as my actual planner. I use my Stalogy as a hybrid bullet journal, for memory keeping, for habit tracking, and numerous other things. This is my second real month doing this now—and every month I keep adding and subtracting and figuring out what it is I need. I also have a separate diary journal because I set September up without leaving space for daily writing and I ended up sort of liking that…plus, if I start using my Stalogy as an all-in-one, it may not hold but a month or two once I am through.
I actually made a quick video flip-through of my September in my Stalogy and I am not sure if I am ready to post something like that yet, since I am so new to this depth of journal/planner.
What about you? What are you using for a planner? As a journal? How do you use these items? Not to mention, what sort of cover do you have? Does each journal have its own cover? Do you have one cover to hold everything? Do you use strings? Or do you tuck the covers into pockets?
Leave me your comments and questions below.
Tabitha Low 