Back to school shopping is my all-time favorite retail season. I have always loved shopping for new stationery and writing tools, but there’s something about planners in particular that I L O V E. I think it stems from feeling like every new semester in college was a chance to start fresh, but every time I shop for planners I feel like finding the perfect one will fix.my.life.
After graduating from college and starting my first big girl job, I went through a bit of a planner quarter-life crisis. Not only did I no longer start my life over every 4 months, but suddenly everything had both long term and short term deadlines and surprise projects/tasks could arise that would throw my day/week out of whack. As a new grad, nothing really fit what I needed – ample space for meeting notes, space for personal to-dos, a layout that was hourly but didn’t make me feel like I was wasting space if I didn’t need to arrange my day by the hour, and room for both master and daily to-do lists. I have experimented with an embarrassing amount of planners over the past two years, and I think I *may* have just hit my grove. However, I’m starting a new job soon (woohoo!) and the combo of not knowing when I’ll be physically in the office vs. remote and not knowing what my days (much less, weeks!!!) look like, has me a little apprehensive about my planning set up.
Though there is some uncertainty at the moment and I will more than likely need to modify my system, I think I have found a way to keep myself organized that is flexible enough to work for me.
The Set-Up
Okay, so everyone is different and has different needs, but I prefer to keep my day-to-day planning and hard deadlines on paper and keep “master lists” of tasks that may have more flexible deadlines. I’ll get into my online set up at a later date if anyone is interested, but this post is about paper planners so I’ll get back to that now.
My ideal set up is a two notebook system, one notebook for a weekly to-do list and meeting notes, and a daily planner with an hourly set up and daily tasks.
My daily planner lately has been this one by Passion Planner. I have tried their weekly hourly layout, but it was a bit too much for me since my previous job wasn’t appointment based and I ended up wasting a lot of pages. I can’t even tell you how much I love this planner. If I had to narrow down my top three favorite things about it, they would probably be that it is undated, “the space of infinite possibility,” and paper quality. I also love all the options for personal and game changer goals in addition to the work tasks. I love using the space of infinite possibility for my daily to-do list. I like to categorize my list into main sections then write in the section label in my hourly layout to make sure I’m reserving enough time to get things done. I’m a recovering over scheduler, so this is really important for me!
I have the black version of this planner, but I saw this cute champagne option and I might switch to it once I finish the one I currently have!
For my daily notetaking and weekly lists, I like to use a sturdy notebook. After trying the passion planner daily planner, I learned that I am a big fan of the dotted bullet journal layout. I have never had a notebook like that before, but I think I’m going to try it out. I have previously used moleskin notebooks and random cute notebooks I’ve picked up from target. Really, the most important thing is that the paper feels like it is good quality so that I can easily flip through a week’s worth of notes and to-do lists without feeling like I’m going to rip the pages.
As I said, I’m starting a new job soon, so I have retired my old notebooks so I can start fresh. I’ve done a lot of research and I *think* I’ve decided to go with a bullet journal from Papier. They have so many cute options to choose from! I’ve popped some of my favorites below, but let me know which one you think I should get!
I love all of these options, and frankly love almost everything by Papier. Do you have any favorites from the ones I listed here, or are there any good ones I missed? comment below if you have any preference, or if there is another notebook brand I should try out!
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