Oh my gosh, here I was thinking I have achieved planner peace…and yet…I have not.

The journal is perfect. I made it myself. Hardcover. Coptic bound. Hand-dyed pages. Lots of pages. Tons of room. I had set up all of February with the daily, weekly, and monthly bits I needed…and I only filled in the first week with the trackers and whatnot I usually keep up with on a daily just in case something changed and I needed to stop tracking something or add something else to track.

So, what happened?

I bought the Tarot journal/planner from Writual Society. I had originally purchased the digital PDF so I could print it out and tuck bits into my planner as I wanted and needed. Something with our printer turned the print out–no matter what size–into something I could not quite read and the struggle was more than I felt like working through–so I bought the spiral-bound planner.

At first, I was pulling my daily cards and whatnot, writing them in my hybrid bujo as well as my Tarot planner. Yeah. That lasted about a week before writing it twice in the exact same way got on my last nerve. I actually stopped pulling cards for a week while I worked out how I wanted to proceed.

I decided to use the Tarot planner for card pulls and let it go at that.

But, I also decided to start tracking my health issues, pain, energy levels, etc on a daily basis. I also need to start tracking meals–as well as doing more meal planning. I need to track pranayama and exercise.

Plus, I have been going back in my past three or four hybrid bujos, looking up this, finding the tracking or write-up I did about that…and there was a lot of random bits, er, collections, thrown in — with random collage pieces…and I miss that sort of openness in my journal. I miss just turning to the next page and writing out whatever comes to mind, be it a new knitting idea, or to scribble some idea for a story, or even a quick sketch of a garment or something…and then just moving on with the bujo workings.

However, having everything already laid out, the start of week check-in, the start of month check-in, mid-week and mid-month check-ins, end of week and end of month check-ins, along with the daily and weekly spreads, already planned out and space given…that has been an absolute blessing for me. Even though I have to lay out every daily spread individually the day before, this method has been awesome.

So–how do I combine those two things that are in such juxtaposition to one another?

Well, I have plenty of A5 Traveler’s Notebook-style covers…and I am waiting for some twelve A5 inserts (blank, unlined, undotted, the works) to test out a new process…I am going to use a different insert for different topics. One for my work. One for housework. One for health. And so on…and so on… I could have made my own inserts, yes, but–and i realize this sounds stupid but it’s me–I wanted to use store-bought inserts as my testers before I began to put effort into figuring out how many pages each insert needs for each month and so on … blah blah blah…

However, I am not giving up my hand-bound hybrid bujo. I am going to move a lot of March’s tracking into the inserts…and keep this journal/planner for memory keeping and for whatever other random stuff comes up.,..

So, I cannot tell you how long the insert thing will last–if it will last–or if the hybrid bujo will again take precedence…not until I get everything set up and working.

Once the inserts arrive–I may or may not decorate the covers as they are simple kraft paper covers. I will set them up for March. I’ll have to see what feels good where and how and all of that happy stuff. Once I figure out how things work and how things feel–I will come back and report to you.

Questions? Comments? Leave them below.