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Wednesday, January 16, 2013

How Jotje uses her Plannerisms planner

Many thanks to Jotje for this mini guest post on how she is using her Plannerisms planner!!

So how do I use the going places planner to track my daily chores and habits? Here's how!

On the grey to do column at the beginning of the week is my list with:
Fly lady morning/afternoon/evening routines
And beneath that my daily reminders, like:
Eat 2x fruit, 8 glasses of water, 1 smoothie, 10 minutes mindfulness practice , go to bed before 22.30 h

Then I only need to check the appropriate lines on the days to keep track.
On too of each week day I put my Fly lady zone. Fly lady "prescribes" one zone per week, but I found that this led to a lot of procrastination. Because why would I do a chore on Monday, when I could easily postpone it till Saturday ..? This is not an option with daily zones. There's just no escape : if it doesn't get done today, it's not done at all. Period. Just the pressure I need to stop procrastinating....

Below the daily columns I have check lists. Chores (in the specific zone) that I either planned beforehand, or that I record after I did them, so that I can plan my chores for next week accordingly.

On my year goal pages I have a master list with all the household related projects for 2013, which then get broken down in quarterly and monthly steps.

So far so good! I love using this planner: the paper quality is awesome and the cover is soooooo pretty!

7 comments:

  1. As usual, Jotje has a knack for demonstrating how to use a planner product in a way that is immediately sensible to my brain! I have totally failed to properly grasp how to use the weekly pages for the GPP and this makes perfect sense and gets my creative mind thinking about alternative uses.

    Sadly, I'm running through my most expensive time of year and all my accounts are far too drained to even think of buying a non-essential planner... But I am now thinking of creating something in word or excel to print and insert into my planner with checklists for the various routines I'm trying to form. 2013 is the year of the routine for me. Routines are in no way natural to me and I struggle with forming them, but I have realized that I need to have them in my life to make things work better. Setting things like bedtimes, daily chores at home and work, weekly tasks scheduled on specific days every week, and making time for the things I want to do are all going into my planner now to help me establish ongoing routines to straighten out my scattered life.

    Thanks Judith! So incredibly helpful!

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  2. This looks like something I could do - I can't wait to get my Plannerisms planner (which is currently sat in our UK office waiting for me), but now I'm thinking I should have got 2 :-)

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  3. This is awesome!!!!Exactly what I need!

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  4. This is great - thanks for sharing! I especially appreciate how you've incorporated Flying into your planner; I'm still learning about that. :)

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  5. I am so loving posts like these. They are very inspiring!

    I have two Plannerisms planners. I have never worked or even thought in this way before and I thought setting up a system and tweaking it as it evolved could be messy until it settled. So I have one as a test/workbook to figure what works and what doesn't and then one for the final system once it was up and running. I can't use it for work because my work changes from hour to hour so I am going to use it to create routines and habits for my own well-being. It seems like a daunting task for now so I will wait until my year has settled.

    I suffered total burnout at work last year due to overwork and constant stress in a very high pressure environment. I have had to rely on lists (my memory and concentration were totally shot for ages) and not being too much of a perfectionist to get well but right now a Plannerisms will either help me with setting up routines or it will put too much pressure on me. I am not sure which. Unfortunately I am a perfectionist so I always too put too much pressure on myself.

    After being off sick for a year now I will finally be back at work full time at the end of April so after that maybe will be best. It makes me feel so good looking at them - so pretty and just waiting for me to be ready to use them!

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  6. Josh --

    [I am writing from the U.S.]

    Your desire to create your own planner in Word/Excel resonates with me. Just before the GPP was released I created my own planner, incorporating many of the ideas that are in the GPP. I wish I had known about the GPP before, because I either would have purchased IT, or incorporated the ideas into my own personal planner.

    Let me start by saying that one key reason I created my own planner was that I received a nice, small padfolio as a gift from my office. It has a pen-holder and pocket on the cover, and two flap-style pockets on the inside cover, plus another pen-holder. It came with a spiral-bound notebook with extra-wide rule. But it is about 1/2" too short to exchange that notebook for a standard Moleskine/GPP planner (rats).

    Nevertheless, I did create my own planner using Microsoft Publisher, and here's what I did:
    --12 monthly calendars (two page spread)
    --12 pages (one page each) for my daily routine logs (e.g., exercise, among other things)
    --Weekly Plan pages (as shown in the picture above)
    --Blank note pages following that.
    [When I do this again, I am thinking of exhanging some of the blank note pages for to-do checklist pages.]

    I have Adobe Acrobat professional, so I created a PDF, then using Snowfall Press printed it on high quality paper as a one-copy, self-published book. [I've worked with Snowfall on office projects, so creating my own 'book' was easy.]

    Because it is a 'book', I got to create my own colourful cover using a photo a beautiful lane I saw in Prague recently. I did not want to use my own laser printer because it curls the paper (ever so slightly, but that matters when I'm looking at 100 sheets of paper) AND consumer-grade toner and laser paper don't provide the paper and print feel that GPP (and any professional document) has. It cost me $8 to print it at Snowfall Press.

    Once I received the printed book, I took it to FedEx Office (USA), had them slice off the bound edge then coil bind it. So now my planner can sit open, as recommended in one of Plannerisms tips pages.

    This is a low cost project (overall), giving me my own custom planner that fits in my nifty binder, for a total outlay of about $15. But now that I have the template in Publisher, I can improve it for next year using what I learn from using it this year. I can say that the last four weeks have been the most productive of my last ten years, from a planning perspective, because I abandoned trying to squeeze my life into the electronic world.

    Having this planner with me at all times--and open to my current action on my desk--has been wonderful.

    In conclusion, let me encourage you to pursue creating your own planner. It's even easier than mine if you print it yourself. You can get a binder at an office supply store. Franklin Covey sells a Classic-sized hole punch, and it uses half-letter size paper, so it's perfect for home printing.

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