What I Am Doing In My Planners For July

All right. It is OneBookJuly season. I am watching this year’s videos by various people just to see what they are doing.

I had no intention of moving into a single planner at all.

I have not even been decorating my planners with stickers or anything else for weeks and weeks now. I’ve been too tired, too depressed, too unwilling to push myself to go find something I would like to use. Plus, our youngest has completely taken over the office. I can reach parts of my desk, but not all of it. I cannot even get close to my chair. He’s an artist. He’s at work. He cannot be disturbed. If it were that much of an issue, I’d be making sure he cleaned up and I had access. I do have a bag of planner stuff I can take with me anywhere that has stickers and whatnot. I just haven’t been into the entire idea of digging through it and yada yada.

Now, what have I been doing?

For my original Hobonichi Weeks Mega (Ophelia), I have taken the trackers that I kept in the back of the book on the blank grid sheets and moved them to the weekly spreads. I stopped tracking anything for several weeks because I ran out of the desire to do so. I now track the weather and temperature daily, as well as my sleep schedule (or lack thereof) on the weekly pages, as well as my daily word count. I have always tracked my daily word count there. That’s not a new thing. I gave up trying to write prompts and writing ideas for every single day months ago because it was wearing me out to see what I didn’t use.

In my Hobonichi Spring Start “Bunny Weeks” (Melangell), I keep track of my weekly Anchor Card (Tarot or Oracle), any Tarot readings I do or watch for my rising sign, and any other notes that seem applicable to me. I will also stick in affirmations and little things of that nature as well. I am supposed to be doing a lot of monthly Lunar-inspired activities in the back on the grid pages, but I haven’t pushed myself to do it in a couple of months.

I am still using my 2020 Hobonichi Techo Cousin that I am redating as I go along. The only thing I put in long-term are monthly tabs. I am reaching a place where I have been pondering letting go of this planner and moving into a different notebook for a bit to test some things out. I kinda like keeping her around though.

For the record, I am not keeping up with any of my planners very well lately.

Last week though, I did pull out an A5 dot grid notebook and set it up. It is not technically a Bullet Journal. It is far more a commonplace book than a BuJo. I didn’t get one of the best notebooks from my stash, but one I found at a discount store and had contemplated setting up a BuJo for our youngest. It didn’t happen because he didn’t want one like that.

I did create a cover page with July 2023 on it. I did create a monthly spread. Each day on one line down the side of the page with any needful occasions to be fitted in on the right side of the day. I would have put in a regular calendar because these line views of the month are typically not the best thing for me, but since I started mid-month, it didn’t matter all that much to me.

I did create a weekly spread, in the horizontal style. I actually prefer vertical, but this is the one I know I can manage quickly and without issues. Eight slots per week. Seven for each day and one for notes. I put my tasks for the day on the appropriate day. And that is pretty much it.

For my daily pages, if I am using the notebook and not just doing the bare minimum, which is what happens when I am not all that into anything, much less planning, I will re-write that day’s tasks, and any tasks from the day before that I did not complete.

I draw a line under the tasks and that is where I put my daily gratitude.

The next page is the daily log, or where the daily log starts. I do not log the tasks that I completed here. That is what I still stick in my Hobonichi Cousin. In this notebook (nope, I did not name this one.), I write down observations, questions, things that occurred to me, things to check on, things to think about, and things to add to my various task lists (like books to be read, makes to create, and so on). Whatever comes to mind, this is where I write it.

It is sort of like a diary, but not entirely. I write quick little notes on these pages. I do not write out long diatribes. My longer versions or ideas or whatever go in my journal. Most of the time, what goes in this notebook and what goes into my journal are two totally different things.

This is what is working for me right now, when I work with it. Just so you know what’s going on here.