I have fallen down the rabbit hole and not one of my own bunny's making. There are a lot of subcultures on the internet, and I have begun my assimilation into one of them - or more correctly - into another one of them.

It's the sub culture of personalising personal planners.

Not so much the life coaching type of planner, but the Filofax, Rolodex, timetable/diary/journal type of planners. Yes, that diary or compendium or carry-all that many of us have to keep us on track and on task.

These things were HUGE in the 1980s. Not just in popularity but in actual size. People had their whole lives in those things. Some believe that's why the Internet was actually invented so that people who suffered from back problems from carrying these huge tomes around could have a place to store their shit. Nah, I'm kidding, we all know the internet was invented for cat pictures.

Anyway, fast forward to this century and the advent of personal personalised planners. People pimping their planners out with colours and papers, with charms and artified dividers and that's the rabbit hole I am blogging from right now.

This last weekend I solidified all my resent (obssessive) research on the subject and created my very own personalised Personalised Planner. I glued and stuck and trimmed and cut and had a jolly good old time pimping that cheapo vinyl planner out to a system I think might work for me.

First of all I looked at what I really, actually need help with. What, of all the tools I use online to help keep myself organised, just wasn't working for me. I boiled it down to four main areas:

1. My blog
2. My goals
3. My tasks
4. Drawing

Yes, yes I do have online tools to help me with these too but once I'm away from the keyboard, they're not visible to me. Sure I can dial them up on my iPhone or the iPad but I still have to think about going there, then taking action on that thought, then remembering once it's closed again and hells-bells, I'm such a "simple peoples", this just isn't working for me. My blog ideas dribble away; my goals get forgotten; my tasks just pile up until they are of avalanche proportions.

So here we go. Back to the pen and planner. Throwing away all the default inserts that come with these things - such as calendars and days of the week and contact lists - and making tools that suit what I need.

My journal is now divided into:

1. Blog topics ideas and post drafts (this month's schedule and templated pages)
2. Goal visibility (feeds into the task list)
3. Task list (bullet journal style)
4. Drawing (series of watercolour and sketching papers)

I'll see how that works for me over the next few weeks. I'll pop up a list of sites and supplies later this week if you're interested in this rabbit hole too. You'll find when I share these links many videos like this one I completed yesterday. In this video I'm talking to my sister Jo who was the catalyst for my full blown dive into this subculture.