Weekly Planning Woes: The Saga Continues

I seriously didn’t think I’d still be struggling with a weekly planning system this deep into the year, and yet… here we are. Struggling.

My daily planning? Solved years ago. Monthly planning? Nailed it at the start of 2025. Weekly planning? Still a battlefield. I thought it wouldn’t take long to find a system that worked with the way my ADHD brain functions, but I was wrong.

This is an update post—I blogged about this not that long ago, and since then, I’ve tried a few more options. Spoiler: none of them are perfect.

📎 Attempt #1: A5 Ring Binder with Two-Page Insert

As I mentioned, my A5 ring binder with the two page insert worked pretty well. Not perfectly, but good enough. Except that A5 ring binder when open took up too much space, space I couldn't afford to lose. And closed? Out of sight, out of mind.

📝 Attempt #2: One-Page Weekly Insert (with Lines)

I tried another weekly insert, a one page this time, with the idea that I wouldn't need the binder. The first insert I tried had lines. I whited them out, but now I had whiteout lines and that was as good as actually having lines. It made it seem as if a task was assigned to a particular day which wasn't the goal.

It's totally my brain and how I see things, but put this one in the fail column anyway.

📒 Attempt #3: Weekly Desk Pad 

Next up a desk pad. It had a smaller width than the binder when it was opened, so maybe this would work without taking up the amount of space the rings did.

I managed to find this at half off, which is a good thing because this didn't work for me either. The layout was sort of okay, but items got lost even using a dot marker to put a bullet point in front of them. And this one still took up a lot of space, although it was better than the A5 rings binder.

📄 Attempt #4: One-Page Insert with Left-Side To-Do List 

This week is desk pad week, but next week I’m trying this one. It’s one page, but the to-do list is on the left side, which already feels off. And yes, the dreaded lines between days are back. My brain doesn’t like this, and I don’t know how to overcome it short of designing my own inserts.

I’m going to try it anyway. Maybe I’ll be surprised and my brain won’t stutter over it. But if this layout doesn’t work, I’ll be back to exploring planner options again. I was really hoping to avoid that.

Reading Journal Joy: The Books That Surprised Me (In the Best Way)

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My reading journal is woefully out of date. While I like the 8 x 8 size square journal I'm using, it's also too much space for me. If I had time to hunt down decor that matched each book I read, that would fill all the open space, but I don't.

It already takes enough time to print the book covers for each book I'm reading. Decor is a bridge too far for my schedule.

And while I can't read as many books as I'd like, I thought I would share some of my favorite reads so far in 2025.

💖 Books That I Fell In Love With

Under Your Spell - Laura Wood 

The heroine is the daughter of a famous rock star, and things are not going well. She loses her job, her boyfriend dumps her, and—just to add insult to injury—he takes her cat. What’s a girl to do except call her sisters, break out the wine, and perform the childhood ritual known as the Breakup Spell?

What follows is a whirlwind of misadventures, including a one-night stand with the most famous musician on the planet and a job she definitely didn’t ask for: spending six weeks alone with that rock star. There's chemistry, banter, and an awesome romance.

From the moment the first sister showed up to console her, I was laughing. I also really liked how the heroine came to terms with her issues about her famous father enough to reach out and accept the love she and the hero had.

Let's Make a Scene - Laura Wood

Two five-star reads in a row made Laura Wood a new must-buy author for me.

I loved this book so much that I reread it immediately after finishing reading it for the first time. I wasn't ready to leave Cynthie and Jack's world that quickly.

Cynthie Taylor gets her acting break thirteen years earlier on a small British film starring alongside Jack Turner-Jones, the son of acting royalty. Yes, both his parents are famous actors. It's hate at first sight. Or nearly so. The chemistry between them is palpable, and while promoting the film, they pretend to be in love.

Fast forward to present day. Cynthie is now Hollywood royalty, and because of a lying jerk, is now public enemy number one. She's dropped from her next movie, but she has a chance to film the sequel to her first movie, alongside Jack. Oh, and throw in a let's-pretend-to-be-a-couple, something they both have reasons to agree to.

When I tell you I couldn't get enough of this couple, it's not an exaggeration. I could have kept reading them for pages and pages more. Just totally love this book from start to finish. 

The Blonde Identity - Ally Carter 

This book made me snort-laugh as I read. Humor is subjective, but I generally don't laugh out loud when I'm reading. I tend to simply smile at the funny parts. But Blonde Identity? It was a good thing I was reading at home and not out in public.

The heroine wakes up with amnesia, and when she sees footage of herself fighting off multiple men, assumes she must be a spy. It's the hero who tells her she's the identical twin sister of the super spy she thought she was. But the people chasing her sister don't believe she's not her twin. Good thing she has the hero (who really is a spy) to keep her safe.

Once this story got rolling, I couldn't read fast enough. So much fun and lots of little romance book references that I enjoyed.

Final Thoughts 

I’m pretty sure my 2025 book journal is going to remain half finished, and that’s okay. I’ve already got plans to switch to an A5 journal for 2026—less space to fill, but hopefully just enough room to jot down my thoughts. I’m not going to complain about this year’s journal, though. The important thing is that I discovered new books and authors I hadn’t read before, and they gave me hours of entertainment.

So if you’re on the hunt for a new author or book to fall in love with, these three titles come highly recommended by me.

Symbols, Ink, and Storylines

When Cal first made his appearance in the Paladin League series, I knew very little about him. He was the team’s new medic, and that was all I had.

Then I needed to describe him—and there it was. An amateur-looking tattoo on the inside of his left forearm. I didn’t plan it. It just showed up. I paused, curious, but I was focused on other characters and let it slip past.

Then came Lurch’s story. And again, that same tattoo was mentioned. When something gets called out twice, I have to believe something’s going on there. I wondered why he kept it. He could’ve had it removed. He could’ve buried it under something bigger, more polished. But he didn’t.

Information wasn’t forthcoming. Cal wasn’t ready to explain himself. But now I knew something was there—I just needed to unearth it.

As Cal took up more “screen time” in the series, the details began to surface. He got the tattoo on impulse, shortly after he enlisted. It wasn’t planned, wasn’t pretty. But it mattered. He keeps it as a reminder that impulsive actions have consequences.

Which, of course, started me asking questions. What impulsive actions are you talking about Cal?

The tattoo is a symbol of something. He gave me easy answers first, evaded any follow-up questions, and was cagey as hell. I learned about his relationship with his heroine that crashed and burned, but that felt like one of his easier answers. Not the root cause, especially since he got the tattoo more than a decade before he met her.

Now I'm working on his book. I needed that information in order to know him well enough to write him. I pressed a little harder.

I got the answer. It's something that changed him and changed the trajectory of his life.

The tattoo marks that moment for him. No one else knows what it means or why he's kept it. He only gives the easy answers if someone is brave enough to ask. His other tattoos are precise and done by skilled ink artists, but Cal still keeps the dagger.

Because it's his truth that he feels he needs to carry. You can get all the answers in July 2026 when Wicked Temptation is released.

Weekly Tries 1 and 2

Here's my latest update on my attempts at finding a weekly system that works for me. So far, I'm 0 for 2, although I was so close with the first one.

For those of you who are new here, I have ADHD, and while I have a daily system in place that keeps me on track for those tasks, at the start of 2025, I was working to come up with a monthly and weekly system. I figured out the monthly early on.

The weekly? I'm still trialing things. And those trials are still failing. Here is the story of my latest two attempts.

Trial one. I have an A5, six-ring binder from when I was using planner inserts instead of a planner. What if I got a two page weekly insert and only used that for weekly tasks?

It sounded promising. I ordered undated inserts that I really liked. And I still really like them, but I ran into a small problem. Space. My original idea of keeping the binder in my office didn't work, that meant I needed it with my actual planner on my kitchen table. Only that binder takes up a heck of a lot of room. Closing it defeats the purpose, so I thought, let me try a variation.

Trial two. A one page weekly insert. This way, I can just have the one A5 page on my table and not the binder. Space issue should be solved.

And I immediately ran into a problem. The layout of the one page insert didn't work for my brain. I tried fixing it with correction tape and by drawing my own lines, but I still don't like it.

So I ordered a different one-page weekly insert, which hasn't arrived yet. That will be trial three. If that doesn't work, it's back to the drawing board. I have to have a way to get my weekly tasks done!

Reading Journals: The Updates

I was all excited about my two reading journals--one for nonfiction and the other for fiction. So what happened?

I haven't read any nonfiction books since the first few. That journal is sitting, gathering dust.

The fiction reading journal. I kicked butt on that reading challenge back in May because my book was with my editors, and because I can only work on one project at a time, I had some time without writing/revising which made it easy to read.

I've made a discovery. When I am writing, especially when I am writing a lot of words in a day, I don't want to read. Instead, I just veg out either playing games or watching videos.

This has increased my library book jam. I've kicked so many books I have holds on down the road that it's ridiculous. But I don't want to check them out and then just not read them because I'm too focused on my own work to read someone else's story.

Since I'm trying to get caught up on a reading challenge that started in January and I didn't discover until what? July? This made it an extra challenge for me. I'm still way behind and I don't know if I'll catch up at all because I need to write more than I need to read. People are waiting for Cal and Io's book.

Part of the problem is that I think I should have used an A5 notebook as my journal instead of the 8x8 journal. There's too much to decorate and too much to write, so even on the books I have been reading, my journal is woefully empty. Just the book cover and a sticker where I put the title, author, reading dates, and genre.

I'm rethinking 2026's book journal. I think I am going to try an A5 and this time I'll know about that year-long reading challenge at the beginning of the year, and will tackle it slowly rather than feeling as if I have to race to catch up.

And there's still the problem of not wanting to read when I'm doing a lot of writing.