2014 Quo Vadis Journal 21 day per page planner WORLDWIDE GIVEAWAY!!

This giveaway is now closed. Please check tomorrow's post to see who won!

Here is your chance to win a 2014 Quo Vadis Journal 21 day per page planner! Steve has very generously offered to give away his (unused) 2014 Journal 21 which he reviewed in a guest post here on Plannerisms (click here to see).

The Journal 21 is 5 1/4 by 8 1/4 inches (14 by 21 cm), has a blue refillable cover, day per page format with monthly calendars, and super-smooth 72 gsm paper. I did a review of the Journal 21 with loads of photos of the pages and features, click here to see more details of this excellent day per page planner.

 

 

Steve will ship to the winner anywhere in the world! Thank you Steve!!!

1. To enter, submit a comment here on this post. Your comment is your entry. Only one entry per person please.

2. Entries will close at 6 pm London time on Monday September 9. Any entries posted after that time will not be counted.

3. The winner will be determined via Random.org.

4. The winner will be announced here on Plannerisms on Tuesday September 10.

5. The winner will email me your shipping address to Laurie at Plannerisms dot com. If I do not receive an email from the winner by Friday September 14, a new winner will be determined.

6. I will forward your shipping address to Steve, who will send you your prize!

Spread the word! Good luck everyone!

My journey to Journal 21

Here's a fun story of planner obsession for you!

So as you may know, I've had lots of success this year using a large day per page diary (the Time Traveler diary, to be specific) as my everyday records book and journal. I've struggled a bit with the size and weight in my bag. But I have been so consistent with recording and journaling in it, which I've been unable to do for years, that the weight is worth it. I have decided that a large daily book is just my thing.

Cue panic: what will I use NEXT year?? I must have a large daily planner!

(I know, I know. I can't help it.)

Time Traveler planners are from the US, but I ordered mine from Amazon UK. But, what if Amazon UK won't carry the 2014 Time Traveler planners?? The Time Traveler website only ships within the US! And, Time Traveler planners don't ship until September, so I would have to wait a few months before I would know whether I'd even be able to get one or not.

I wanted to get a large day per page planner for 2014 as soon as possible, to have the security of knowing I have what works for me already on deck for next year. And in fairness to myself, usually by now I have at least one daily Moleskine planner in my hands. But I have decided I can't buy Moleskine planners any more because my pens bleed through and make the other side of the page unusable. I wanted either another Time Traveler, or something just as wonderful.

Steve recently did a guest post on my blog with his day-per-page Journal 21, which made me pull out my Journal 21 that I reviewed here several years ago. It really is such a nice planner, with super smooth paper and month calendars! Those are so hard to find in daily planners.

So I went to the Quo Vadis UK website because I know they carry some US Quo Vadis planners. Lo and behold, a Journal 21 refill was listed on the website. I ordered it up when I ordered my Space 24 weekly planner.

Then I received a very nice and apologetic email from Quo Vadis UK that they no longer have access to the 2014 Journal 21 planners (which are a non-stock item and can only be stocked from the US by special order very early in the year).

I was undeterred! By this point I absolutely had to have a 2014 Journal 21. So I searched US websites and found the least heart-stopping international shipping (from Alkos) and ordered up my 2014 Journal 21, with the gorgeous Club cover in Lilac!  It shipped only an hour after I ordered, and got here just a week and a half later! Super fast!

I love the color!

This year's Lilac cover is more pinky than the Lilac club cover from my 2010 Journal 21. I can switch out the refillable covers, so I'll use whichever color strikes my fancy that day!

The 2014 Quo Vadis Journal 21 day per page planner still has all the same great features as the 2010 Journal 21 (you can click through here to see my post with detailed photos of all the features). The only differences I noticed are that the corners are squared now instead of rounded like the 2010 version's, and the print in the 2014 is just slightly darker which I prefer because it looks more crisp.

Here is the excellent daily layout with month reference calendars and month indicators at the edge of the page to easily find the month you're looking for (a feature I LOVE!). (Click on photos to enlarge.)

There are monthly grid calendars, which are so hard to find in day per page planners!

And there are monthly column calendars to track expenditures and longer-range plans.

All the other great features are still there too like the Anno-Planner overview calendar for the following year, bound-in address pages and more. And as I mentioned before, that super-smooth Quo Vadis paper!

I'm happy (and I admit, relieved!) to have this daily 2014 planner in my hands!

Guest Post - Exacompta - Journal 21 - Steve

Huge thanks to Steve from Philofaxy for graciously agreeing to do this excellent guest post!

So you might be wondering what am I doing here on Plannerisms, surely this is a mistake, picked the wrong blog out of 'My Blogs' on Blogger... no not quite.

I recently did a little bit of consultancy work for Quo Vadis in the USA with regards to them importing the Quo Vadis Organiser range of inserts in to the USA from France. It seems I am the world expert on planner hole spacing... what a sad fact to have on your CV!

As a thank you for my time and input, Exaclair USA asked me if I would like a planner of my choice. This was actually quite a difficult thing to do for me. Firstly as you know I'm a 'ring bound' sort of guy. I've had bound diaries/planners in the past, but these have been HMSO/Niceday standard issue ones, no real choice other than 'Would you like a wall planner as well?'  The Wall Planner tended to get more use than the bound diary.

Anyway after consulting the Quo Vadis USA on-line site and looking through Plannerisms, which is a far more useful site for seeing the details of any planner than I ever would have thought, I chose the Journal 21 with a Club cover in blue.

Now you might be wondering will this one also sit in the cupboard if I'm so in to using Filofax organisers. Well I like to have a planner and a journal. The planner for present and future things. A journal for what actually happened.  In my A5 Filofax I use two different diary inserts for this, as well as a third insert for blog post planning. So the A5 does get a little full. The Planner and Journal diary inserts are of different designs in my Filofax

Now I have no intention of using the Journal 21 as a planner, instead I will use it as my Journal. Laurie's excellent review of the Journal 21, which I consulted and absorbed in detail here concentrates on using the Journal 21 as a planner in my language.

Now for me... not living in the USA there are some issues with a USA produced planner as a planner in France. The public holidays aren't quite the same, but in terms of using this as a daily journal, the non UK/French Holidays I can just ignore and write in the UK/French ones at the top of the page or record them within the day as required. 

Looking at the Quo Vadis European website, the Journal 21 isn't available, instead there is the ABP1 which is similar in size and layout. This I believe is available in Canada. Of course being made in France the ABP1 will be in French where as the Journal 21 is English... US English, but unless anyone knows different we do spell the month and days the same!

However, being a US product it will alert me to public holidays in the USA, which I am not aware of, and things like the changes to DST in Spring and back to normal in Autumn.

Naturally my main interest in this planner is to use the Day Per Page:

Down the left hand side of each page are timings from 8am to 9pm in half hour intervals. I will most probably ignore these, although they might be handy for recording what I did in the morning, afternoon and evening.

I'm not sure that I will use the monthly pages for anything at this stage, nor will I use the address pages at the back of the Journal 21. 

Overall I think this will be a great journal for me to use  next year. I can leave my Filofax open on the planner pages, the Journal 21 open on the current day and this will prompt me to make more entries each day compared to now. I will be consulting Ray Blakes 'Journalling School' for some hints and tips as well.

So yes it will be possible to mix ring bound and bound planners! Yes I didn't think I would ever say that either!

Thank you to Sunny at Exaclair for supplying the Journal 21 and to Laurie for letting me share this post with you.

Desperate Times Call For Desperate Measures

I'm feeling very overwhelmed lately with everything I have going on. It must be the phase of the moon or something, because it's not just me: every time I've called my sister this week we wind up going on for an hour about all the things we're freaking out about.

I emailed Sandy a photo of the hot mess that is My Planner This Week (MPTW), something we do for each other often. It gives us ideas of how to use our planners, and also helps each other understand what's going on in our lives that week. I told her, rather than me going on and on about what's happening in my life I should just send her a photo of MPTW so she can see it and go, "Wow, no wonder you're freaking out."

I love my weekly planner, and I need it to help me prepare for what's coming up in the week. But there are times, like now, when seeing everything I need to do all week long gets pretty overwhelming.

Well my friends, desperate times call for desperate measures. It's time to get shit done.

So I turned to one of my favorite websites ever, Getting Sh-t Done by Bill Westerman. For those of you who haven't read about GSD yet, get yourself over there and read it. It is a distilled version of all those productivity systems everybody's reading about these days.

I talked about GSD a little bit in my Lists, Lists Everywhere post earlier this week. It's a great way to whittle down your To-Do lists, and manage lots of tasks. As Bill says, GSD keeps you "focused on the tasks at hand rather than on the task of organizing." For those of us who tend to get bogged down in organizing instead of doing, this is the jump-start we need.

I busted out my Journal 21 day per page planner (that I reviewed here on Plannerisms) to use for my daily lists. The large pages have plenty of room to write in any scheduled items and my huge list of tasks that day. There's also enough room to fill in what I actually did, which is often different from what I intended to do. Plus I love the monthly calendars in the front of the Journal 21 so I can see upcoming events at a glance.I don't tear out the corners of my daily planners because I don't like how it looks. So I'm using tape flags to mark the pages of the current month (blue) and today (bright pink).

Then I put GSD into action: I wrote out my Master List of everything I need to do (in a separate notebook). Then I went through and decided on what I could do today.

On today's page in my Journal 21 I first wrote into the left side of the page (next to the printed times) any scheduled events. Then in the right side of the page I listed my tasks. This helps me see when I'll have time to do the tasks, but doesn't force me to artificially schedule them.

Now I have a whole page on which to capture everything, even those tiny tasks that I wouldn't normally write into today's space on my weekly planner (such as replace the battery in the carbon monoxide detector, which woke me up with its low-battery beep very early this morning). This of course makes a great record of what I did and when.

Having all my tasks on one master list, then filtering them into what I can do Today helps me 1) be realistic about what I can accomplish in a day and 2) plow through and get it done.

Once I've gotten through all those tasks hanging over me, then I'll be free to Do Epic Shit (by Charlie Gilkey, who writes one of my other favorite websites, Productive Flourishing). I love his message: people aren't born epic and then go on to do epic shit. "Everyday people do epic shit and then become epic." Rock on, Charlie. My favorite part of his article is in the last two lines. Go read it, and then go do some epic shit.

What do you do when you're feeling overwhelmed? Can your planner handle everything you throw at it, or do you have to break out of it sometimes?

And, what are you doing that's epic? Tell us about it!

Exacompta Journal 21

Here is my review of the Exacompta Journal 21 (with the beautiful lilac Club cover that I love so much) which was so generously sent to me by Karen at Exaclair in New York. Thank you again Karen!

The Exacompta Journal 21 is a large (5 1/4 by 8 1/4 inches) day per page planner that is refillable with a removable cover.

According to the paper label band that comes on the book, "Exacompta is the Prestige edition of Quo Vadis." The Journal 21 lives up to that Prestige name in every way. The book is elegant, well-made, and shows fine attention to details. According to the Exacompta website, "Elegant and intelligent, Exacompta products follow a French philosophy that even simple tools should be good quality and a pleasure to use." I heartily agree!

The paper band also says the book is made in the USA, which I really appreciate. Thank you for supporting American workers, Exaclair!

I have used many, many different brands of day-per-page planners over the years. (To see just a few of the daily books I have used in the past, scroll down and click "day per page" under Labels in the sidebar.) So I have a good idea of what works in a daily planner, what features are nice, and what is a daily planner fail.

A big problem I've had with most day per page books I've used in the past is that I get "lost in a sea of individual days" as I call it. Without the visual indicator of a weekly layout, I forget where I am in the week, fail to look at what is coming up, and even frequently forget what day it is. Seeing only a two-day spread in front of me allows me to focus on today, but often at the expense of planning ahead for later in the week or month.

The Journal 21 has completely solved this problem with some very clever and extremely useful features to help you keep track of where today is in the context of the rest of the month and year.

On the daily pages, there are calendars for this month and next month, with the current week highlighted. This makes it easy to see where today is in the month and week. Also on the daily page is printed the number of the current week, and where today ranks in the year. Another wonderfully useful feature is that the months are highlighted as tabs along the side of the page, so when you are flipping forward or back in your book, it's much easier to find the month and subsequently the day you're looking for. (I love the monthly tabs!)

Also in the above photo you can see that holidays are printed at the top of the page without taking up too much space for writing the day's priorities or major events. The day and date are printed in large type right at the top of the page, again making it easy to find the date you're looking for.

Perhaps the most glorious feature of the Journal 21 is that it has monthly calendars, with spaces large enough to write in. This makes the book infinitely more valuable than just a regular day-per-page book. This makes it possible to use for forward-planning and monthly overviews of deadlines, things due, or upcoming events.

In addition to the monthly calendars, there are semi-annual calendars with the months as columns, for longer-ranging overviews of upcoming travel, holidays, reports due, long-term projects, etc.
There is also an annual planner for next year, for farther future planning.
I thought this was interesting: there is a notes page holding the spot that February 29 falls on during leap years, thus keeping the exact same number of pages in the book each year. This not only ensures that refills will fit into the covers year after year, but also probably helps keep production costs down to have the standard bound book with the same number of pages each year. They've thought of everything!

Another important feature is that the book lays open by itself (despite me holding it flatter in the above photo). This is extremely important, because as my sister says, "A closed planner is a dead planner." Especially for a day per page book, which I need to have open in front of me all day for maximum visibility. Staying open by itself to today's page is of utmost importance! The Journal 21 does it easily.

The paper: The paper is wonderful to write on, very thick and smooth. But, personal preference here, I don't care for the green tint. The slight greenish tint is designed to be glare-free and easy on the eyes, and recalls the early days of the Exacompta brand when they made ledgers with the same "Registre Azur" tinted paper to make it easy to look at during the long hours of entering numbers by hand. I personally don't find it to be very friendly-looking. I consider my planner to be my constant daily companion, and I look at it all day every day, so I want it to be friendly-looking. I prefer the ivory colored paper of the Exacompta Daily Pocket, shown compared to the Journal 21 paper below. The ivory paper is warm and inviting. So anyway, I don't care for the green tinted paper, I would prefer ivory or white. Just my personal preference.

**Edited later to add: You know what, despite all that, after using it awhile I discovered the slight greenish tint really is soothing to look at. So, I take it back! Yes I would still prefer white paper, which I always do, but the greenish paper really is nice.

(As a side note, the Exacompta Daily Pocket has many of the same features as the Journal 21 including the monthly calendars and semi-annual planner, so if you like what you're reading about the Journal 21 but need a smaller book, the Daily Pocket's the one for you.)

Whatever your preference about the color, there is no arguing that the paper is joyful to write on. Smooth and thick, it's nice to touch and takes ink extremely well. I tested a variety of pens, most of which were liquid ink pens, of various point thickness and all did extremely well. Even the thickest (the Broadpen) had absolutely no feathering or bleed-through to the other side of the page.



The only other complaint I have is a common one: there really needs to be a ribbon bookmark (or preferably two, one for the daily section and one for the monthly). I don't mind tear-off corners for weekly planners, but I am very, very opposed to them in thicker daily books. Day per page books are very classy-looking, especially this one. But when the corners are torn out of the book, that gappy, flappy corner looks sloppy, which is unfortunate. I still haven't decided how I will mark my pages in the Journal 21 without tearing out the corners. I tried using a bookmark but it slides out of the smooth pages. I think I will glue a ribbon page marker to the inside of the spine of the book and use that.

I love that there is a variety of cover style and color choices, adding to the personalization and overall enjoyment of using the book.

I highly recommend the Journal 21 for anyone who wants a larger but still portable day per page planner that is loaded with features that let you focus on each day and also do longer-range planning. It's a good-looking, elegant book that is a pleasure to use, and is also a very powerful planner! Well done Exacompta!

When is a planner not a planner?

I am getting to know my new Journal 21, which was very generously sent to me by Karen at Exaclair (many thanks Karen!) and which I will be posting a review of here on Plannerisms in the near future. Above is a photo of it, in its gorgeous lilac Club cover, with my phone just for fun. Don't they look great together?

Every year I use a day-per-page diary in addition to my weekly planner for a variety of uses: overflow on those really busy days when I have a lot going on; as a "brain dump" when I have so many things swirling around in my head that I need to get them all down on paper; as a landing place for jotting phone messages, notes and ideas that would otherwise get written on some random piece of paper and promptly lost. When I write these things onto a dated page in a bound book, they are so much easier for me to find again later.

A dated day-per-page book can have so many more uses beyond the usual scheduling appointments and listing to-dos. Here are some alternate uses I thought of:

• daily journal
• gratitude journal
• dreams journal
• recording cute things your kids did/ said (I do this, and it's so much fun to look back and remember)
• noting daily weather (I do this in my daily journal)
  
• phone log/ messages record
• lesson planning
• medications record
• exercise/ training regimen record
• food diary
• menu planning
  
• ideas record (interesting to see how they develop over time)
• blog ideas (guess where I wrote the draft for this post? My Journal 21!)
• garden planner/record
• daily record of expenses/ budgeting tool
  
• sales record
• tracking finances and/or investments
• record of communications with clients
• work record (DianeB's excellent idea)
• meeting notes
• quotes/ motivational statements
• sketch of the day

Can you think of any more?

Past vs. Future

As I've been going through my old planners (see my Ghost of Planners Past series) I've been reliving what my life was like during those years. It's really interesting to see what I was doing at the time, and little details I'd forgotten. For many years I have kept journals, but my old planners give me a much better picture of what my day to day life was like at the time. My journal is good for recording what I was thinking/ feeling, but my planners show me what I was actually DOING.

My favorite past planners to read are my day-per-page ones. An entire page for every day gives me lots of space (and therefore incentive to fill it) to write what I'm doing/ have done that day, which makes an excellent record. I tend to jot down things on the page that I wouldn't have with a smaller space, and it's these little details that tell a lot about what was going on in my life at the time.

The photo shown (which you can click on to enlarge) is a page spread from my Textagenda (that I bought on a trip to Paris which is why it's in French) that I used in grad school. I studied the origin of birds for my Master's degree, and was an assistant instructor. Here you can get an idea of what a typical Monday was like for me: the Priority of the day was to complete a section of my paper. My schedule at the top of the page was pretty full. In the notes section you'll see I had to email some guys about materials to set up the undergraduate lab I was teaching that week. You can also see that materials were in short supply so I had to borrow or share things like books and overhead transparencies. I needed to finish grading the previous week's labs to hand back to students that week. And, oh yeah, I had to get my homework done too. I was pretty busy!

You can also see where my money was going: a dollar to DeAnn, the secretary (for a Geology department chip-in for someone's birthday), $10 cash to buy materials at TIS (our university bookstore, which happens to be where my sister bought her Textagenda a few years before), and of course the big one, to pay my university bursar bill for the semester.

Just this one page tells a lot about what was happening in my life at that time. And my planner was a great reference too. Later when the Bursar's office called to give me a hard time about not paying my bill, I was able to look up that I DID make the payment, over the phone, on Lundi 10 Septembre. See the check mark? That means it's done!

Speaking of using a planner to record daily details, the Quo Vadis blog (which is excellent by the way and you should read it) recently had a guest post by DianeB of Pocket Blonde where she talks about how she uses her Textagenda to record what she did at work each day. This makes her monthly reviews easier to write and gives a more complete view of how she spent her time that month. When she kept a record of the little details she otherwise would have forgotten, she discovered she was being productive in ways she hadn't realized before.

Using the same book to record not only appointments and tasks but also ideas is very interesting to me. Jeff Abbott has said that he uses his Journal 21 as a combination planner/ journal. I love this idea because it seems like it would paint a more complete picture of your life at that time: what you were doing, ideas you were contemplating, what was going on around you. I may try this in 2010.

Ultimately I use my planner not only to plan, but also to create a record of when I did things such as when I sent that check, made that phone call, or whatever else because I tend to forget these kinds of details. My new Minister (that I luv-luv-luuuuuv) has large daily columns in the weekly view that give me space to plan as well as record. It makes an excellent record for me to look back at what I did and when I did it.

Format becomes an issue when using a planner not only to plan but also to record. The more space you have for each day, the more details you can write down. But in order to have so much daily space, sometimes you have to sacrifice other features. Although day-per-page books are great for recording lots of details, they can be difficult to use to plan ahead for upcoming events. A planner with a weekly view needs to have large day spaces in order to do much recording. But larger day spaces can mean a larger book, and of course the larger the book the harder it is to carry around everywhere in order to have it handy for writing down those details.

Do you use your planner purely for planning? Or do you use it as a combination of planning and also record-keeping to refer to later? Do you feel like you have to sacrifice a longer-range calendar view, or a portable size book, in order to have enough daily space to record all of your details?