Decor Disasters

Sorry for the planner talk two posts in a row. It's October, which is close enough to 2025 for it to be planner season and I'm excited.

I'm sharing more from my 2024 planner although I'm going to embarrass myself because my work is clearly amateurish. I'm learning and I hope to improve as I do this a few more times.

Because I enjoy vellum images, I decided to add some to the blank pages in my soon-to-be-expired planner. I tried pasting them down, taping in tip-ins on the inner edge, the outer edge, and the bottom edge, and it was a mixed bag.

Some of it kind of turned out okay. Most of it didn't end up looking very good at all. And I have more vellum to try out as I desperately try to fill up pages.

The crazy thing is that a lot of people who use this planner create daily pages on these blank pages (368 of them, perfect for a year's worth) and I never thought of it. Argh!

Next year, I will use the blank pages to journal one page a day and won't have this problem.

I started with a tip-in. For those unfamiliar, that means the page is only attached on one side and it opens out to show the page below. I fastened this one to the spine side. And somehow, I cut the vellum too short for the book. I had it laid right over the page while I cut with the scissors, so I don't know how it happened, but otherwise it pasted in well and works as expected. I'm giving myself a B+.

The vellum on these two pages is pasted down on the left, and a tip-in on the right. This one is pasted down at the bottom edge.

This one? Well, the left page has very little room left to write and it's narrow at the top before widening out. The tip-in on the right is a mess. I ended up just folding the vellum at the tape line in order to write. This one is probably a D.

I had a small piece of vellum left over from this design and I just pasted it down on the top of the next page. Nothing special. Grade is a C.

New day, new design for the vellum. The picture above this paragraph is the tip-in from the front view. The picture below is with the tip-in paged over to expose the notebook page below.

On the plus side, this page was cut much closer to the right size than the previous version. The negative? I taped it down too far onto the writing page and it pulls it, which I don't like. I did better the first time I tried this. C-.

There was a little problem with the glue here. I tried to rub it off, but as you can see on the left-hand side, I wasn't successful at getting it off. I also managed to crinkle the pages, and I didn't get the vellum on the right-hand side glued down correctly. I ended up taking a scissors to trim off the excess. F. Maybe an F-.

The final two pictures are the same page. This is a tip-in I fastened to the outer edge of the page. This also got into epic fail territory. I managed to crinkle the page badly, the tape isn't folded over the page well, pulling on the other side, and it's horrible. Another F-

I'm hoping I get better at this because I really do enjoy the idea, and the vellum looks so cool when it's done even halfway correctly. 

I have eight more pages of vellum design printed. If I can't figure it out in that number, I might have to give it up.

Scribble, Scribble, Scribble

The first image is a picture of my 2024 weekly planner when it was brand new. I'm not a weekly planner girl. It doesn't work with my brain because I see things listed in the week and think the day they're assigned doesn't matter. I can do them whenever. That means I don't do them at all.

No matter how important they are.

But I bought this planner more for the monthly section and its size. This is a B6 which is very manageable, but not too small. My dad had so many doctor appointments and I'm not good at electronically managing schedules, so my plan was to keep track of all of that here and carry it with me. And then my dad died before 2024 started.

It became more of a notebook after that, but while I loved the paper, I wasn't using it often. And then it was August and new 2025 planners were about to come out and I was like, GAH!

I decided to start really using this notebook. In addition to the planning pages, there are like 370ish blank pages. I had a lot of work to do.

I had monthly tabs left over from 2021. I think that was one of the years I thought about bullet journaling? Maybe? I know I tried once in 2016 and gave it up quickly, but I have a package of mini calendars that say 2021, so I must have tried again. I used the tabs that only had the month on them to tab out the weekly sections.

My plan? I'm going to time track myself. Lots of work, work, and more work on there.

I also know I'm more likely to use something if it's pretty, so I printed out some vellums and pasted them into the book. This is the first month I added. August.

Between the OMG, I have all these blank pages, and I don't want to haul a 2024 planner with me and OMG, I love this vellum, I managed to start doing some journaling. It helped that I found some writing notes scribbled on the back of the information package I got when I had surgery in 2021.

I copied the notes. Shredded the surgery papers. :-)

I also really love using Post-it notes in my notebooks. Like really, really, really love. I've shared pictures of my writing notebooks filled with Post-it notes on top of pages filled with notes in the past. Here's a spread from this planner.

I picked this one to share because it's from a class I took online, and I don't have to worry about spoiling any of my books by sharing it. I usually never use the super large Post-it Notes for my notebooks, but I needed the extra room here.

And then I had another brainstorm. Since I love using Post-it Notes so much, why not use pretty Post-its? I had some white sticky notes, and I had free printable template with some pretty patterns, so I decided to run those through the printer and have them on standby, ready to go.

I know there isn't much room to write, but since I have a lot of blank pages to go through, that might not be a bad thing.

Journaling as fast as I can because 2025 is coming!

Another Brilliant Idea Crushed by Reality

I had this grandiose plan to make my own silicone stamps for my planner. I knew exactly what I wanted and all I needed was time to sit down with my graphics program and make the images.

I'd found a video on YouTube about how to do it, so I was set. Piece of cake.

Yeah. Right.

Sadly, my graphics skills failed me. They're rudimentary at best, but trying to put together the check-ins I was looking for was beyond me. I tried. And tried. And I failed.

I went with a different plan and bought rubber stamps with the icons I wanted. I would have preferred self-inking stamps because I seriously have trouble with inking, but those were $10 per stamp. The rubber ones were slightly over $2. Big difference, especially when I was looking at about half a dozen.

So disappointing, but I've had a new brainstorm. I'm going to make my own stamps for my book journal! Those would just be words, not images, and I'm sure I can type them successfully in my graphics program. The only problem will be getting the size right. I figure printing them out will solve that issue, so I should be able to handle this.

But this is a project for future me. Stay tuned.

Another Multiple-Planner Year

Guess who's ending up with multiple planners this year? Again.

I ordered my usual planner super early, not realizing that I would be hating it by September and dying to get out of it. I have replacement options and I'm weighing which one will be it.

I also ordered the planner I'd been using in 2024 for journaling because it worked so well in this capacity. This is more formal journaling where I actually try to write nicely. I have another book where I scribble down words and it's a hot mess.

And of course, there's the planner I didn't expect to like, but fell in love with this year. It's become my EDC (Everyday Carry) planner and I'd be lost without it now that I've gotten used to having it everywhere I go.

My usual, official planner is an A5 size and on a spiral which makes it a desktop planner, not a take everywhere planner. My portable planner is a B6 and it has Tomoe River Paper, which means there are a lot of pages without it becoming a heavy tome I'm lugging along with me. I've bulked it up with vellum tip-ins and stickers, but it's still portable.

And then I came up with some ideas to combat my ADHD, all of which require a separate planner. Two extra planners.

Another method I came up with to deal with my ADHD was time tracking so I could see what I'm spending my time on. I bought booklets in traveler notebook size to handle this. I've been doing it the last few weeks, but in 2025 will start color coding so I can see how much time I'm wasting when I don't mean to relax.

Then there might have been a few accidental purchases. Planners I spotted that might absolutely work as my new daily planner, but I won't know until I try them out. I have ideas on how to use the ones that don't make the cut, so they won't go to waste.

This is a test year. A way to come up with a system that works and helps me combat my ADHD issues. I hope to have everything worked out long before 2026 planner season and keep the line up minimal.

The One with the Strategies

Being diagnosed with ADHD this far into my life has been interesting. Some of it is like, oh, that's why I've always struggled with this. And some of it is like, how did I cope for this long without anyone knowing, even myself?

I started doing more research into ADHD and found some YouTube videos, including ADHD hacks for your house. Of course, I watched them because anything that could make things go more smoothly at home would help.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that I'm already doing many of these hacks. Maybe this is why I made it this far without being diagnosed?

An example is creating a station. I have a coffee station and I've done this since I started drinking coffee. My coffee maker is near a water source--either my sink or my refrigerator or both. In the cabinet over the coffee maker, I have everything I need to make coffee like paper filters and the coffee itself. I also have everything to make my cup of coffee, for instance sugar-free coffee syrup. Everything I need for every facet of coffee making either brewing or drinking, is in this area.

I've created stations in my bathroom using little caddies and baskets. My crafts go in craft totes, each craft in its own one. My knitting projects go into a bag with all the yarn for the project. If it's something I'm actually knitting, it's a tote bag. If it's a project I want to knit, but haven't started, it goes in a giant plastic bag with a zip top. Everything goes in there. The yarn I'm going to use and the pattern. That way, when I'm ready to start the project, I can just grab the plastic bag.

How do I get into trouble? When I don't put the pattern in the bag. I was knitting a project that I quit when I was over the halfway mark. I want to pick it up again but can't find the pattern. It's not in the project bag. Where did I put it? Who knows? Can I print another copy of the pattern? Sure, but the copy I was using had each row I'd knitted marked off. If I print another, I'm going to have to walk through it line by line, row by row until I figure out where I left off.

Another idea in the videos I watched was a Go-Bag for traveling. Every toiletry you need for your trip is in that bag and you never take anything out of it. I've been doing this since probably the 1990s. I kept my toiletry bag in my suitcase, and when I was planning to travel, all I needed to pack was clothes. Everything else was ready to go.

There were other ideas that I know won't work for me, like keeping track of things digitally. I've tried that and I would just delete the notification and forget all about the thing I was supposed to do. This is why I moved to a paper planner. Daily, not weekly.

Weekly planners have never worked for me because I see items listed across the week and it feels like if I got them done whenever during the week, it was okay. And because doing them on a particular day didn't matter, I never did them at all. A daily planner keeps me accountable. Yes, it's more of a to-do list than anything else, but I need it in the planner or it's too easy to blow it off.

If it's written on Tuesday, October 2nd, though, I'll actually do it on Tuesday, October 2nd because it bothers me not to check off everything on my list for the day.

The problem I'm trying to solve now, and where I've been falling down, is trying to remember to do things that don't have specific due dates. I've already mentioned the separate to-do list is too easy for me to ignore, and that digital doesn't work for me at all. So?

I think I figured out a way to keep up with a home declutter project. I created a cross between a creative journal and a bullet journal where I listed every single thing to go through. Example would be tall dress, drawer one. Tall dresser, drawer 2. And so on. I haven't actually tackled anything yet, but I'm hopeful because there is a space to check off finished items! The pieces are also very small, literally one dresser drawer at a time instead of Organize and Declutter Bedroom. That's overwhelming and will literally never happen.

But what about the random tasks? That's where I'm stymied. Another notebook? I'm still mulling.

Anyway, I just thought it was really interesting that even though I didn't know I had ADHD, I came up with strategies to function that are actually recommended. I just need a few more strategies.