New planner

I bought a new Kikki K planner when I was in Melbourne last month. Today I spent a lovely afternoon creating the beginnings of new dividers for my planner. 

I trimmed and glued, crop-o-diled (corner rounder) and washi'd, punched holes and thought about how I'll set my new planner up. Time flew and I had a wonderful, creative Saturday. 

NEW PLANNER SETUP

I choose Summery colours as the weather raged Wintery blasts outside. It's so much fun cutting and decorating for the sole purpose of making something lovely for myself. My next step in this process, now I have the dividers done is to figure out what my "day on a page" template might look like.  

The objective is to keep my projects and promises (delcarations) top-of-mind so I chip away at them every day - I'm such a planner girl :) 

Kanban for one

I've only recently become aware of Kanban boards. Simply, they are a three column status board for projects. Each column has a heading:

1. To do
2. Doing
3. Done

One of the easiest ways to set one up is with a white board and post-it notes - write the task on one of the post-it notes and moving it from one column to the next depending on the status of the task.

Sounds simple because it is simple. 

What makes it work is that it's visible.

That sounds simple too, and it is, and it works.

Earlier this year, New Year in fact, I made a few declarations. I declared this year to be the YEAR OF THE SELFIE, and the YEAR OF MORNINGS and, not quite as loudly, the Year of Lunches. I blogged about my declarations; I wrote my declarations in my planner; I downloaded apps for taking daily selfies; downloaded Kindle books on the benefits of and techniques for rising early in the morning; I bookmarked a bunch of websites for making 'totable' lunches. 

I took two selfies; woke up early once; and now my ex husband makes my lunch but that's not what I meant with declaring 2015 the Year of Lunches.

My poor old memory couldn't keep my declarations in the front of my brain where I could see them every day. The declarations were hidden from my view behind swipes and passcodes and tabbed planner pages. That lead me on a Google journey where I discovered Kanban boards.

I made one, stuck it to the back of my bedroom door, and set about moving my post its from to do to doing to done. It's working - not 100% of the declarations 100% of the time - but a hellova lot more than none!

My butt ugly really rather useful kanban board for one

Associated links

1. Kanban boards (Wikipedia)
2. Personal Kanban boards (smallfish.co.nz)
3. Kanban board examples (Flickr)

Planner Event Horizon

I’ve been thinking about black holes this week and if there was ever a massive gravitational pull in my life similar to that which distorts spacetime as much as a black hole it’s my aspirational desire to be a planner girl.

Back in April I let you know I was wandering around the web warren of planner tutorials and websites. I bought a cheap-as-chips Personal (relates to the size rather than use) planner and after having a good think about what I’d want to use my planner for, knocked a prototype together. I’ve been using it since then and it suits me well in someways, and reveals itself less helpful in others.

What it has been good for is:

1. to do list (in the form of a bullet journal)
2. card wallet
3. blog article planner

The planner also housed a section for my goals, notes, drawing paper, and a section called “inspiration” with the idea of capturing good, well, ideas. Although I thought I needed those sections, I didn’t use them in my daily life. I thought by having my goals in my daily planner they’d be more visible, and therefore easier to take action against. Alas, this did not work for me - so I’ll need to figure out alternative ways of keeping my goals ‘front of mind’.

But back to the planner.

The bullet journalling technique for tasks worked brilliantly. I loved everything about this system: drawing my own calendars; writing very short descriptions against dates; key of symbols so I can see quickly if it’s an event or a test etc.

Keeping my important cards in the planner has been a god-send too. It sounds simple but up until this planner I hadn’t had a wallet in a long time. I think I’ve lost about two years of my life looking for my EFTPOS card in my handbag - not to mention if I’d ever needed to dig out my Driver’s Licence and I never did know where my AIRNZ Airpoints card was. Using the purpose-made slots for my cards works well and (so far) I’m pretty good at returning the cards to their safe home.

Speaking of cards, one of my old plastic cards was used to store Washi tape. It came is so handy when I was overseas a couple of weeks ago. I’m a fan of utilising train-station lockers to hold bags while I shop, or before I check into a hotel. The key-code for getting back into the locker is always printed out on a small piece of paper that I worry I’m going to lose. Not this time: washi-taped to the inside of my planner I always knew my locker ID code was safe and sound.

Fold out monthly blog planner

Although there hasn’t been much evidence of it here, the planner was also a good home for blog article ideas and plans. I created a fold-out page with a grid to represent a month’s worth of days to house my topics for the blog.

Now I have ever been a fantastic planner and a poor executor of such things. I love planning and my best intentions for getting those words onto the screen has a bit more work to be done, but I’ll get there.

All in all I’m chuffed with my cheap-as-chips Personal planner and the things I’ve learned while using it. I’m looking forward to upgrading to a newly decorated A5 leather planner with much more confidence in the investment of time and money knowing it will be used and useful. 

Planning my new A5 Kikki K planner's monthly spread