Hello Crafty friends. I feel like this blog post should come with a warning. NO CARDS HERE!! NOT A CARD POST!! DONNA WILL NOT BE MAKING A CARD TODAY!!! (Also there will be no frog eating – see the disclaimer at the end) What we’ll be doing instead is setting up my planner.

I had two main aims in organising my planner. Firstly, I want to be able to create a better flow to my days, getting on top of some habits that I need to introduce into my life. Secondly, I want to take some pressure off myself. I’m a big one for writing to do lists that are way too long. The result is that I never feel like I’ve done enough. I wanted to deal wth both things, and of course play with stamps and pretty papers!

This year I’m using a Japanese planner. My current planner is a day to a page. I don’t have a life nearly exciting enough to fill a day to a page, but I like the extra space for notes, planning, lists and the occasional card sketch. In this post and video I’ve set up for March and April, and made a two way tip in page that can be used to track habits for the whole of each month. I did lots of decorating with the Bright Days Ahead 6 x 6 papers and the matching Bright Days Ahead Die Cuts.

There is a video of the process that you can see here:

Firstly, I tackled the too many things to do in a day problem. I found one of the stamps in the Planner Stickies that had a three point to do list. I’ve stamped these onto separate paper and glued them into my planner, (This year’s planner has very thin pages) concentrating on the weekdays. I’m using these to list my three main, achievable goals for the day. Any list under this is merely a suggestion. That way, even if I don’t do all the things on the page, if I’ve done the three main things, I can call it a successful day. At the time of typing this, it’s definitely helping!

Next I tackled some of the longer term habits that I’m trying to build. I created a page that I would be able to see all month. I used the Radial Habit Tracker to create a list of things that I’m trying to keep on top of. Because I seem to move countries every few months, it’s been really hard to keep to habits. I used the Big Script Months stamp to label the pages, and added a mini calendar with I made using two different stamps combined – Planner Basics and Mini Calendar Creator. These two stamps are sized just right so that you can fit them together and the numbers fit perfectly inside the grid. All the colours were chosen based on the colours on the Bright Days Ahead paper for each month,

March is on one side of the page and April on the other, so that when I attached it with washi tape down the side, it could be flipped back the other way for the next month,

Now, onto that frog. The idea is that if you have a list of things to do for the day and one of them is to eat a frog, then the best time to eat it is first thing. If not you’ll just spend the whole day worrying that you have to eat a frog later. I put this into my March goals in my planner as a reminder not to procrastinate on the hard tasks. Any frogs that I eat will be metaphorical!

That’s all for today. I wonder whether you are a(n over) planner too, and what you do to stay on task. All suggestions are gratefully received!!!

Until next time, may your days be full (but not too full!)

Blessings

Donna