Well Planned Life

A few weeks ago on Philofaxy , Paul asked the question as to how everyone uses their planner —not just the set up, but the actual planning process.   Here, I will try my best to answer that question.   There is a lot that goes into my process, which requires a lot of photos, so please bear with me and this long-winded post… Since I recently bought my 2013 inserts , I will start there.  Upon receiving the next year’s inserts, I fill them out with any birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, etc.  I file them accordingly depending on where in the year the inserts fall (for full details, click on the link above).  I always have a year’s worth of monthly inserts in my binder, so every six months, I rotate those inserts—in July, after I’ve received my next year’s inserts, I remove January – June of the current year and add January – June of the new year, making it a July – June spread.  In January I will remove the July – December inserts for the old year and add July – December of the ne

All information for the next Philofaxy meet up in NYC can be found here .

Back in the beginning of June, I discussed my issue with my work to do lists .   I am happy to report that my experiment in writing them right in my Filo is working out well.   I started to add my work to dos to my daily pages, and while I was skeptical at first, this has proven to be the best method for me (for now). In short, I used to have a separate spiral bound planner just for work items.  My work schedule would be added to my Filo, but the to dos would go into the work planner.  This worked for a long time, but when it came to time management and deciding which items needed to get done when, based on my schedule, flipping back and forth between both planners became too cumbersome.  And since my work schedule has to go in my personal planner, I figured I would try adding the to dos as well. So how have I managed to keep work to dos separate from personal to dos?  Color coding of course!  I have talked about my color coding system before, but I’ve had to tweak it just

Philofaxy ’s last Free For All Friday determined how I would spend today.   I had already decided that I would take today off as a mental health day.   But when the subject of 27 Dresses came up, I decided I would watch it—I had never seen it, and so, why not?   In addition, I just got my 2013 inserts, and so what better plan could I have than to get them up and running while watching 27 Dresses ?   And so, that is what I did. First, I got all of my supplies together: They consisted of my archival box , my personal black Guildford (in which I keep the last year’s worth of inserts), my personal ochre Malden (in which I keep the current year’s inserts while they wait their turn to be rotated into my compact), my compact wine plum Osterley (since that’s what I’m currently using), my 2013 inserts (month on two pages and day per page), and my pen bag (this was a recent Barnes & Noble purchase—owls!). Then I moved any 2011 inserts that were in my Guildford to my a

Every summer, my family and I go to Vermont for a week’s long vacation and family reunion.   This year was no exception.   While there this year, I looked around for something that I could use to beef up my planner inserts.  Stickers—maybe, but finding Vermont stickers was not going to be easy.  Inserts—no I would never find those.  Pictures—sure, those I could find very easily.  But how incorporate those into my compact binders without making them too bulky (like last time ) would be the hard part.  But I happened upon a little something that I knew would be great for my purposes. I found a small wall calendar featuring scenes from Vermont. It’s your basic wall calendar—it opens up like a flip calendar.   On the top is a picture, and on the bottom is a monthly calendar grid.   Flip the page up again, there’s the next month.   And so on.   The last thing I need is another calendar.   I don’t typically use wall calendars, but this paper was thin enough that I knew I