Well Planned Life

For quite some time I have used two pages markers, one for my monthly spread… …and one for my daily spread. I can see where the current month and day are, whether from the top or bottom of my planner. This has worked well.   I am easily able to find my monthly and/or daily pages with a flip of one marker or the other. I recently bought more storage boxes from Franklin Covey for archiving purposes , and while shopping, I clicked on their page markers .   I have always been fascinated with their pager markers because they have a slip pocket for putting slips of paper in.   So I bought one of those as well and put it among my daily pages. I immediately moved in to that slip pocket. Here I put a list of items that I need to work on sooner rather than later, things that can’t be forgotten behind a tab somewhere.   Having it here, I see the list every day—multiple times a day, really—and so I am constantly reminded of t...

Using a compact binder as your daily planner obviously means that you cannot carry an entire year’s worth of daily pages.   And since I can’t get away with using anything less than daily pages, I have to compromise.   Just like my Household Binder holds everything I don’t need with me on a daily basis, my Past/Future Inserts Binder holds all of the inserts I don’t need with me at any given time.   I have a rolling calendar system in my daily binder.   I can get a full year’s worth of monthly pages in there, as well as 2 – 3 months worth of daily pages (in addition to everything else I carry—if I didn’t carry anything more, I could get 6 months worth of daily pages in there). I use my personal Ochre Malden to hold all of my extra inserts. I don’t put anything other than inserts in here, as you can see upon opening the binder. The first insert is cardboard, which (if I remember correctly) I bought at Muji .   They originally had top tabs...

After only a few months since discussing my “new” archiving system , I’ve gone and changed it.   There is a reason for that—one day I was looking for an old planner insert, specifically something I had written on an insert.   I knew it was from either 2012 or 2011, and I hadn’t a clue as to the time of year it happened.   So I dug out my archive boxes and started to look through.   What I realized is that while it’s easy enough to pull out the stacks of inserts from any given year, un-rubber band them and search, it was a pain in the neck.   Inserts were falling off my lap, the stack is so big that I couldn’t (easily) get the rubber band off or on, and I couldn’t flip through the inserts without having to take the stack apart.   True, it’s not often that I rifle through past inserts, but when I do, I want it to be easy. Enter my new system.  After reading posts from both Homemakers Daily and The Crazy Life of J , I went with Franklin Covey’s Sto...

With the start of every year and the preparation of inserts comes the archiving of the past year.   Last January, I explained how I archive my old inserts .   In February, I explained why I archive my old inserts .   In August, I showed how I prep for the upcoming year once I receive the inserts.   So now the time comes to discuss archiving my 2012 inserts. My system isn’t all that different from what it was.  However, I have made one small change—I swapped out my archival box.  I have received a lot of positive feedback on the old box, people asking where I got it and what the dimensions are.  Truthfully, I don’t know.  It came as one of many in a set that was given to me as a gift (picture me at my wedding shower, opening a large box to reveal a smaller box, which revealed a smaller box, and so on and so on).  If I had to guess, I’d say it came from The Container Store , something very similar to this .  For the purpose of ar...

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 m...