No Appointments? A Planner is Still for You!
After an unpredictable year like 2020, it’s refreshing to turn the page on a new year full of hopeful possibilities. Still, we’re not quite out of the woods and your schedule might reflect that. We’ve definitely seen a shift in our own schedules with less appointments and more fluidity. We’ve still found our planners to be an invaluable asset amidst all the change and we wanted to share a few ideas with you to help you get the most use out of your planner. Even if your schedule is no longer dictated by appointments, you can create action items from your to-do lists, project plans, or goals in order to create a schedule for yourself and hold yourself accountable to the progress you want to continue to make.
SETTING GOALS - If you’re an avid planner user, you probably understand clearly how to successfully set and reach goals. Actually writing it down is a huge first step! But breaking down your goal into bite-sized action items and then scheduling each of those items is vital. When your schedule is full of appointments, you’re almost guaranteed to complete those appointments because someone else is holding you accountable. Take the same approach with yourself! Use our Goals +page to plan out your approach and then schedule each action item into your weekly layout. You can also use the habit trackers in some of our layouts to help you hold yourself accountable to your goals on a weekly basis. If your goals are related to budgeting or finances, you can add our related +pages to your planner and then schedule a time for yourself to review those financial goals each week. You could even use one of our Year-at-a-Glance pages to track how much you spend each day—there are just so many possibilities!
PROJECT PLANNING - There are so many ways to use your Golden Coil planner to help yourself make progress on projects! We often ask ourselves, “What items do I want on my to-do list? What passion projects do I want to be working on?” If your schedule is more fluid right now, this is the perfect time to add structure by adding items from your passion projects. Maybe you’ve been wanting to remodel your bathroom for years. Use a dot page or project planning page to sketch out and plan—and then start adding one step at a time to your weekly schedule! You could also use dot or project planning pages to map out your garden, create a mini-mood board for re-decorating, sketch out thumbnails for an art piece you’ve been wanting to make, or start diagraming a book you’ve always wanted to write. Or maybe you’re wanting to get more into cooking—we have lots of meal planning and recipe pages to facilitate that! Using your planner for aspirational work can still translate into practical tasks that fill your schedule.
JOURNALING - Golden Coil planners or notebooks are excellent for journaling! We feel strongly that even your daily schedule is an important record of your life, which is why we use high quality archival paper in our planners. But you can take that record keeping further and make your planner a priceless piece of your history by adding pages for more journaling. Lined or blank pages are a great addition for a more traditional journal and dot pages are perfect for bullet journaling. You can also do a 1-line-a-day journal by using our Month-at-a-Glance page. Journaling is also incredibly helpful for mental health, which is why we’ve added pages for mood tracking and wellness. These are a great resource to enhance other journaling you’re doing for mental health!
SCHOOL - Whether you’re teaching or learning right now, your experience probably looks a lot different than normal. Teachers have a lot more to track and plan and we have plenty of pages to help, such as our Assignments page for tracking homework or our Lesson Planning page for mapping out lessons. (See our favorite pages for teachers here!) We also have specific weekly layouts we’ve created for teachers, such as Vertical 3. Students also have more responsibilities associated with homeschool or distance learning (which often means the parents do, too!) and a planner can make all the difference in staying on top of a schedule and homework. We especially love our School +page for staying organized with homeschool or distance learning!
No matter what your schedule looks like right now, we hope you find a planner to be a valuable tool for staying organized, forward thinking, and turning your goals into reality.
Is your schedule more fluid these days? How does your planner help you make progress when you have less appointments on your schedule?