This year has been especially big for me in the planning arena/ I have always kept a record of my days and this typically had a to-do list somewhere amidst the pages. This past year, however, I have been working towards a more planning the day and record keeping of the day equilibrium sort of thing.

I have in love with a lot of things about and within the planner community. I subscribe to a couple different monthly subscription boxes, all with different focuses. For example, one is more about paper; one is about washi and stickers, one is about business planning, so on so on. (I will go into detail about each subscription service in later posts, in later days.)

Add into that, I have had issues this year keeping up with the holidays and celebrations and birthdays and other important dates…because I had intended to put everything into a single reference journal as I am using a three month at a time Passion Planner Daily Planner…and I didn’t want to either put in 3 months of dates into each journal…or put all years dates in all four of the journals…and I have worked on my reference journal, but I focused more on the things I thought ‘should’ be in the reference journal, rather than focusing on what I needed and wanted to get out of that journal the quickest.

I have, now, a basic month-by-month holiday/important dates section of my reference journal…but i am continually coming up against things I have forgotten or missed — and trying to catch them before it’s too late. I nearly missed Easter completely this year, for one example.

My other problem is as I have gone back into past journals/planners seeking out information, I have seen things that I am missing in my current set-up. I miss the arty stuff. I haven’t been using stickers so much this year with my dailies. Usually, after I washi each page to hide hours and dates, I am pretty much done…and that is sort of sad. Even though I do try to tip in as much ephemera as I can every day, depending on what arrives at the house, and my January through March journal was hugely chunky comparatively…I am still missing a lot of creativity…and I don’t feel all that compelled to stuff everything into one planner…but I don’t want to miss out on some things either.

I have genuinely missed the weekly and the monthly reflections from my hybrid bujo-ing. Now I have scrapbooking paper tip-ins for that.

But, I now also have my planner, which is a business and personal planner where I keep my PLANS, my to-do lists, my ideas of what else needs to be done if i finish of my most important things of today list. My PashPlan Daily has become more of a memory keeper–that began back in early March when the previous two months were too chunky for me to have access to the entire page that I had normally used for planning the day.

PashPlan daily is a two-page per day spread. I had used the left page for planning and the right for memory keeping/keeping track of my day sort of thing.

Another issue I have been having with the daily is that a lot of my appointments are scheduled four to six months out…which without having something where I can put that information that I trust I will find it again well before I need to find it…I a=have been struggling…in 2020, I had the Passion Planner weekly planner, which covered the entire year…and that is what made my life a great deal simpler.

And so…I bought another planner, this one an A5 six-ring binder — which, thanks to one of my subscription boxes, I am not so adverse to these days–although I wish I could find an A5 binder that has two0inch or larger rings. This planner has a year-long insert that gives me plenty of space for each month (my coveted monthly spreads) but the weekly spreads as well (horizontally)–which covers my need to have the space to write in every appointment, from tattoo removal to medical appointments and whatever else comes up (cough, cough: Pokemon Go events)

I have also gotten into a traveler’s notebook sort of mood, for a number or reasons, like, YouTube videos and one of my subscription boxes…and I now have a B6 TN that I am loving, as well as an A5 TN. I have been using a B6 journal for daily journaling for a bit, but that evolved into my note-taking journal for a certain class (more on that later) and I needed something else for my journaling journal…welcome my A5 TN…I am currently writing in an A5 journal I had used periodically before I started getting more into planning regularly and whatnot.

I also have prepped that Hobonichi Techo I chickened out of using in 2020–it’s set up in a beautiful cover and waiting to become my daily journal, a place to write and a place to stick sketches and drawings and whatnot in.

Plus, thanks to Sarra Cannon who is a terrific enabler–and I love her dearly for all the things she has encouraged me to do this past year, even though she doesn’t know me from Adam), I have pulled together a writer’s planner/journal in the form of a Happy Planner Classic disc-bound notebook. I typically hate disc-bound anything. I have so many issues with it, but, because of Sarra, I have been willing to give it a try–especially since my novel has gone off in directions I wasn’t expecting and I now need a way to keep up with all the information my characters are throwing at me.

Before allowing myself to step into a disc-bound journal again, I did set up (thanks to Ninja Writers, which I found on Etsy ages ago), a writers planner, in an A5 six ring binder…I bought the binder in January…I’ve had the Ninja system for … a long time…printed out and everything…and I didn’t cut the pages down to A5 and hole punch them into February…and by March I had it all put together and ready to use. However, the system isn’t set up in the way I need it to be set up for me…and so I am turning to Sarra Cannon’s disc-bound planner, but I am going to set things up the way I need them to be set up for me to see if I can make this work.

So, how many journals/planners is that?

I have my daily PashPlan daily planner–my business A5 six-ring binder planner–my A5 journal notebook — a second A5 journal ready to step in as my daily journal as soon as I finish the last page in the previous listing–A5 disc-bound writing planner–an A5 six-ring binder as a writing planner (for the other side of writing, just basic keeping track–which I actually do in my daily planner, but hey)– a B6 TN for writer note-taking–another B6 for art and sketching–an A5 TN full of inserts waiting to see what I am going to do with it…not to mention, my A5 reference journal and as yet even more unfinished than my reference journal my A5 master to do list. Am I missing anything? Just my art journal and my grimoire, which I am not really using all that much at the moment because of everything else I am trying to work on on a regular basis.

Thanks for listening to me meander here.

If you have any questions or comments, if you want to know anything about any of my set-ups or reasonings, just drop me a note below.