So you do way too much in your life too and have been looking for a weekly planner that actually “gets” you and found The Planner For Those Who Do Too Much and are curious how it looks being used in real life?
Welcome to my world. 🙂
Here’s a peek into how I use The Planner For Those Who Do Too Much to organize my own personal life. For more info on the what the planner is all about (as well as the different versions and add-on sections), go here.
~~ For the Wannabe Bullet Journal info – Go HERE. ~~
Confession: Over the years of personal planner use, I tend to be rather sporadic in my commitment to its usage. Some weeks are super-organized-and-if-it’s-not-in-the-planner-it-will-not-be-done weeks. Other weeks are I-have-no-idea-where-my-planner-even-is-nor-do-I-even-know-what-day-it-is weeks. Regardless, even if I haven’t written in my planner in two weeks, it’s always like riding a bike. Whenever I need it, I can pick it right back up and dive right in to sort out my life.
I assume everyone else has their own flow to the scatterbrain of their own lives, and unlike all the other planners out there I could find that were really structured and felt limiting to me – I tried to create a planner with plenty of spaces that can be used for the variety of different tasks, projects and commitments that someone who does waaay too much would need.
Here’s the planner. What I do is this: I either print the planner at home (on heavier 28-32lb paper) or have it printed at Staples and pick it up there. Then I go to Staples, grab a pack of dividers, open them there in the store (they’ll let you do this as long as you pay for it after!), place the dividers where I want them, and then hand the stack of papers/dividers to the person at the Print Services Counter to spiral bind for me. Spiral binding usually costs a few bucks (<$5). Add in the cost of the dividers and (if you printed for free at home) the total cost is <$8 or something like that.
For my newly created 2016-2017 Academic Planner version show above, I decided to spring for the pocket dividers, and I think it was an excellent choice. Now I can keep things, like the YMCA class schedule, in a convenient location to refer to often.
The dividers also conveniently serve as the front and back covers of the planner.
This is a page from the Academic Planner version. Note that there is a place for brief subject/lesson planner at the bottom of the page. In the Yearly Planner version this is instead a project planner section. See here for the full difference between the two versions.
(and yes, I blurred a bunch of my writing because, well, because it’s weird to share TOO much about the going-ons of my everyday life…gotta keep some things private in this blog, you know? )
This is from an older planner, but it shows the To Do list and Thoughts/Plans/Ideas pages. You can print these two kinds of pages together or into separate sections. Your choice.
The To Do List is meant to be a running list of things that pop into your head that you’d like to accomplish. You mark it as to do “Soon” “Someday” or “Who Knows?” as well as list the due date.
The Thoughts/Plans/Ideas section is good for brainstorming or project planning just as a free space to jot down ideas as they come to you.
To help me quickly find the current week, I typically paperclip or binderclip the current week, kind of like a book mark. You can clip only the current week if you want, or what I do is clip the current week to all the previous weeks, so they are all connected together and the thickness is easier to grab and flip to. But you can do whatever works best for you!
This is a page from the Yearly Planner version. Notice that the meal planer section is at the top of the page.
To learn more about The Planner For Those Who Do Too Much, go the Main TPFTWDTM Page HERE to read all about it!