Back at the start of the year, I mentioned I was planning on using two planners this year. One was a Passion Planner weekly for managing my writing goals that I also planned to use as a reading journal. The other was going to be my free-form bullet journal which would be where I kept track of my daily to-do lists and household admin tasks.
That set-up lasted about six months.
Can you guess what caused my system to fail?
If you guessed the Passion Planner, then you probably have been reading this blog for a while. You may even have said to yourself, back when you read that post at the start of the year and saw that I was making another attempt at using the Passion Planner this year, “Good luck with that!”
If you did, give yourself a prize. You were correct. The Passion Planner didn’t work for me. Again.
Never have I really wanted a planner to work so much before. I mean, that cover is SO CUTE! And the whole set-up is all about achieving your goals! How much more “me” can you get?
I think the problem is that I just hate using multiple planners. I need ONE that does everything. That means monthly, weekly, and daily views. Plus some blank pages for random stuff I need to keep track of.
The twist is, around the same time that I came to that conclusion, I realized that bullet journaling wasn’t really working for me, either.
I started bullet journaling because of the flexibility. It allowed me to have any kind of view that I wanted. I just needed to create it on the page. But, the more I found what worked for me, the more I got sick of creating the framework for each day or week or month. And because I had to create everything as I went along, I never had a good place to park future tasks and milestones as I planned out projects. I just couldn’t get that whole “future log” thing to work for me. Every time I made one, I would completely forget it existed.
Frustrated and annoyed, I went in search of “the perfect planner.” Which, just to be clear, I know does not exist.
I ended up buying a Hobonichi Cousin Avec to try using for the second half of 2023. It’s not perfect, but it does have monthly, weekly, and daily pages.
Then I pulled the reading journal pages out of the back of my Passion Planner and made them into a little booklet so I could continue using them.
So far, this has been working pretty well. I still hate having the reading journal stuff separate, but at least now I can tuck them into my planner and pretend it’s all the same notebook. But next year, I want to incorporate the reading journal stuff into my daily planner.
The big thing I’m struggling with is STILL future planning. But now it’s not because I don’t have a place for it. I think I’m realizing that not having a place for it meant it wasn’t getting done effectively.
As an example, I like to plan quarterly and refine that plan monthly. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a good space in my Hobonichi for noodling out my quarterly goals and associated projects. Maybe it’s just because this is the half-year version of the planner, but there aren’t a lot of blank pages at the back.
For Q4 of 2023, I did all my goals brainstorming and associated project planning in Obsidian (which I’m just starting to mess around with). Once I had that all sorted out, I transferred my October goals onto the monthly calendar in my planner, and then started adding milestones and weekly plans to the monthly, weekly, and daily calendar pages. But I kept November and December in Obsidian. This way, I could tweak my plans based on how October went before finalizing my November goals, projects, and tasks and putting all that into my planner.
This new system is working well enough that I bought the full year Cousin for 2024. Aside from slapping some stickers on the front, I haven’t started to set it up, yet. I think I’ll wait until at least mid-December to start messing with that.
If you like, I’ll do another post at the end of the year to walk through my new setup once it’s ready to go. But next up will be my October reading recap. Did I finish everything on my list? Stay tuned to find out.
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