How to build your perfect planner system? Week 5: Add planning section

Is your Inbox already cleaned? Great job! No? Keep doing! (Missed the last post, how to do it? Read it now!) Long term goal is to empty it every day. I hope you are not frightened about the hundred's of tasks you collected already! It’s time to decide what to do! If you don’t have a plan, you can only react on things coming in. You got an email, you answer on it now. Or maybe you forget it for forever. You are cooking, and notice, there is no sugar at home - you are going to buy some. But what if you would have a note on your planner: “shopping list”, with the item buy sugar - before? And you don't fall into the situation, you don't have sugar at home? You see in your calendar, tomorrow is a deadline for something. It is a nice summer day, would be great to go to the beach with your kids. But you can't because you have to finish that thing. But what if you would have done this task before, and you could decide to go to the beach now? Would be great.
Sorry for the lot pictures! But as you can see I love to experimenting with different layouts, I searched through my archive, and share with you a lot of options I used before.

Divider(s)

First, create a new divider for the planning section. You have lot of dividers already, haven’t you? Did you thinking about what order would be good for that? Your choice! It doesn’t matter! I prefer to keep my planning section in the middle of the planner, because I use it the most, and here disturb me the rings the less.

Don’t react, have a plan!

If you don’t have a plan, you are floating and important things can be fall off. If you plan you make the incoming emergency tasks and all others you schedule. You can decide: when to do it? This decreases the stress level.

Plan your week!

Take a look into your calendar: what have you do this week? What appointments do you have? If you have a lot, you can plan less tasks for this week. What deadlines you have? You should check not only the current week, but the next weeks too! (Later you will have make monthly planning too, than will be more simpler to decide, what to do.) Write your tasks on a note paper, called “Weekly plan”, or something like this :) You don’t need to write here action steps, the “big picture” enough. Write “organise summer trip”, “continue bookkeeping” - you will write subtasks to the daily planner pages!
This is the first time I offer you options, try out what works for you!

Must and should

You are not sure how many things you can achieve? Make two column, one for tasks you must do this week. Really must! In the other column anything you want, and hope you will do. Do not schedule the days now, make it every morning.

What you need and where you will be?

Group things what you can do with something - as your computer or somewhere - as home or away from home, office, etc.

Schedule all tasks for the whole week or not?

When your life is predictable, and you know how much time a task will need to accomplish, you can schedule your whole week in one planning session. Take into account, on which day how much appointments you have!

Half scheduled - half open

Write tasks you must do on a certain day only on the daily page, and list all others to the weekly page.

Weekly must do-s on fold out, and only a few tasks on the daily plan.

After weekly planning: plan your day!

Take one daily planner page for all days. You can choose do1p or do2p (day on one or two pages). If you use 2 pages for a day, use one for planning, and the other for notes, extra informations, journaling...

Some options:

List everything what you want to do

You might write this way too much, what can be frustrating. Hard to prioritise. Benefit: if there is nothing very urgent and extremely important, you can choose task matching your mood. What you didn’t done today, you will make tomorrow. One more contra: you have to rewrite the undone tasks.

Schedule

If you are good in predicting how much time you need for a task: make a timeline, and write the tasks in your timeline. Do not forget to schedule breaks! This is a very effective way to planning, but it’s hard. Who knows how much time need finish something? :)

Here I scheduled only that hours, when it is possible to work.

Here I scheduled the whole day.

Plan blocks

If you are working home, is more important, as you are working in office. Plan concrete timeframes for “housework” “kids” “work”, but for work can you define also sections, as “daily routine” (read emails, write blog, etc), “planning”, a big project, deal with little tasks, calls, etc. Make it visual! Have places on your page for this things. Or: use color coding. If you use this sections plus a timeline also - block out your time!

3 lists: work, chores/kids and calls. In schedule the blue is for personal/family time.

Here I used color coding to tell apart the different things. Orange is family, pink is work, blue is social media.

Block tasks for morning and afternoon.

Make two list for must and should 

I wrote To Do instead of should, I don't know why

Extra picture: 

Left side my weekly plan with must and should, right side the daily, with blocks on post its, scheduled with the same color on the timeline. The daily plan is designed that way you can punch both side, so next day you will have the daily plan on the right side again. When you used both side, remove it, than the actual daily plan will be again next to the weekly plan.

Homework for next week(s)

Make your first weekly plan. Start to experiencing with the weekly and daily planning ideas! The best you take grid paper now and use your liner. Try out, what works best for you? Choose which calls you, use it for a week, and change if you think. Combine the ideas, what I wrote, or find new one - share your ideas with us! You know already what you need? Browse on internet for more daily inserts!

You feel that a daily page is too much for your needs? Do not care about it NOW, make it. Later you will have the opportunity to leave it.

How much from the weekly and daily pages should you have in your planner?

Two-four from weeklies, and one or two weeks from dailies. You can remove the whole week after you done your weekly review (later post), and place a new week. This way you won’t have too much planning pages in your planner.

Next week you will do your first reviews (weekly and daily)!

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask in comment! Share your experiments in our Facebook group, and get more help!  

Find here the whole series.

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