Planner Archives: A Necessity?

In a word: yes.

I’ve mentioned before that I didn’t use to keep my prior years’ planner pages.  I used to only keep the prior year and throw them out when the new year arrived.  But since joining the Philofaxy community and reading that people keep their planner pages for years, I decided to start doing that as well.

Then I got to thinking: is it really necessary?  At some point, I’ll have so many archives I won’t have room to store them, even though that’s a long way off yet.

But this weekend I came to understand why keeping past pages is so important.  As a public employee, I have to complete Civil Service exams every couple of years.  Included in that exam is a list a continuing education courses and/or programs that I’ve attended.  I’m pretty good at keeping meticulous records of this—I keep a running list in a Word document.  Then, I can just transfer the information from my file to the online exam form.  But it’s always nice to double check this information.  And come to learn, I had forgotten to add a program to my running list, according to my 2011 planner pages.  True, I would have found this error if I had only kept the previous year, but it’s also fun to go back to prior years and see what I did on a particular day.  Some many times a date will come up and my husband and I will wonder what we did.  All I have to do is look it up and I instantly know.

I’m sure I’ll need to find a solution for storing those pages once there are too many to keep in my archival box.  But that’s another project for another year.

In other planner news, I am going to create a medical binder and update my Happiness Binder.  Of course I will write about both when the projects are complete, though I suspect it will take a while for that to happen.  In the meantime, look for other fun posts!