My Personal Planner (Part 1)

When I first mentioned my ideal personal planner here, a fellow blogger Dea asked if I can show pictures. So here is one post dedicated to my current personal planner, what I do, how I arrange things, how I keep track of things, etc.

Enjoy!

Warning: this is going to be a very lengthy post about my planner & notebooks. For relatively easier reading (and writing) I decided to split this into 3 parts. This first part is about the planner / scheduler itself. The other two parts will be on personal notebook and work notebook.

MY PERSONAL PLANNER

The leather cover containing my planner & notebooks

This is one of my birthday presents from Robby.

I’m not currently using anything like Filofax or other ring binder systems. Instead mine is a wire-bound 2013 diary that I happened to find while browsing the book store last year. It works surprisingly well for me so I’m hesitant to buy anything else at the moment. The downside is there is limited space for note-taking and I can’t easily move pages to different sections as appropriate.

So I was instantly attracted to this leather cover with elastic straps inside when I saw it in a stationery shop in Wheelock. Using the straps, you can loop them over separate notebooks to have one complete planner. It’s really up to you what kind of notebooks you want to use – ruled notebook, blank, sketch book, music manuscript book, anything A5 sized!

see the 3 elastic bands holding my notebooks?

My personal planner consists of 3 parts: planner book, personal notebook, work notebook. So this entry is only about the 2013 planner.

2013 PLANNER BOOK

2013 Planner from A’Zone

This is what my wire-bound A’Zone 2013 planner / diary looks like inside the leather cover. Simple and fuss-free.

On the inside, it originally opens to this picture taken during our honeymoon to Mt. Bromo and on the left I pasted transparent pockets to hold some stickers!

This photo always brings a smile to my face

Right after this page I have some motivational quotes, verses, just anything that makes me feel positive and happy, as well as my personal goals. The Diary also comes with pages showing standard references like conversions, world times, international calling codes and the likes.

Next comes the Monthly section. It presents each month in two pages, in a grid. Quite a standard format and not very useful for me initially. The grids makes it hard to write as I have only limited space for each day. In the end I use the monthlies for forward planning for things I don’t have exact dates for yet. To do this I cover one side of the page with a regular ruled paper and simply write a list there. Like so:

My monthly list: a piece of paper & deco tape. You can see the original grid page on the right. Haha..

So let’s say I know that next month I need to make a dental appointment, I’ll put it down on September’s list. When September comes I should have a better idea on when to call the dentist to make an appointment and can schedule it on the exact day in the weekly section.

After this comes the Yearly section. This section displays one month per column and each day of the month going down the column.

Yearly section full of stickers & markings!

I use the Yearly section as reminders for certain things, which are continually refined: the picture I’m about to show you is a legend of the colored stickers and markings I use for the yearly section. But even this is already different from how I started marking my yearly pages above. And I’ve further adjusted it so the current legend is also different from when I took the picture! Confused? haha..

See the legend on the right: colored dots to represent different things.

If you look at the Yearly Section again, each day can snugly fit 4 of those colored dots side by side. But I have more than 4 colors! So I simply group items of similar nature together and come up with 4 groups:

Group 1: birthdays, public holidays & days of obligations from church calendar

Group 2: Social gatherings with friends, events, voucher expiry dates

Group 3: Travels, visits, work related deadlines

Group 4: Taxi ride tracking (do you see smileys on my Yearly pages?) Yes smiley means I was on time and didn’t take a taxi to work while ‘frown-ey’ means I took a taxi! Hahaha..

To me the things in each group (except Group 1) shouldn’t clash with each other. Well ok voucher expiry dates are quite extra but still… hahaha… I generally won’t have a gathering with friends while attending an event on the same day unless we all attend the same event! Hahaha. Or I shouldn’t be traveling when I have important work deadlines or when I’m expecting visitors. You get the drift…

Yearly pages give me a quick overview for the days ahead and monthly pages let me jot down in advance things to remember / do for the month. For more details, we go to:

a clean weekly section…

Weekly Section. This layout works very well for me. This is basically a week spread on two pages with appointment times pre-printed on the left side of the page. So I simply draw a vertical line down the middle of each page to make two sections: appointments on the left half and to dos on the right half.

Here’s an example of how my week is usually (the nicer, neater week.. haha..):

a week of planning…

So yeah.. that’s what my planner looks like. Next I’ll write about how I use my notebooks to jot down notes, ideas, agendas, etc and how I keep everything organized and easy to get to.

To be continued…