It really was a hard decision because the planner I've used for the last five years or so has trackers for water, sleep, and vitamins printed on every page as well as a check box for workouts. I'm losing all this with Day Designer and will have to get stickers to replicate it.
But my usual planner has added so many unnecessary things to monitor that it was ridiculous. Not only am I incapable of leaving those fields blank--I tend too much toward OCD to do that--but I was losing space in the part of the page I needed most. So those added fields felt too much like work and I'd be pushing against space limitations on a lot of days.
Day Designer's flagship planner is bigger than my usual planner, so I'll actually have more room and they have all kinds of handy boxes on the page where I can add stickers to track water, sleep, vitamins, and workouts. Plus!
And Day Designer was ready to ship the day I ordered it. My usual planner is a preorder that wouldn't have arrived until sometime in November. Probably. So I'll have my hands on my 2022 planner shortly and won't have to make notes for 2022 appointments in the back of 2021 like I've been doing. Plus!
You don't want to know how much time I spent watching YouTube videos of reviews for daily planners. Weekly planners do not work for me. There doesn't seem to be that many daily planners available. My number one requirement was it be in one book. I don't want two or four planners to cover one year. I want and need everything in one place. That took out two of the planners I was looking at.
My other requirement was that it be dated. That took out another planner. None of the remaining planners had full days for Saturday and Sunday which I would love more than anything else on planet Earth. Who are these people who have idle weekends and don't need a huge amount of planner real estate on the weekends?
Another thing that ended up impacting my decision was that I wanted the times preprinted in the planner. I didn't want to have to write in my own times for appointments. That eliminated several more planners and it basically came down to the three I was looking at to begin with.
I did start working on the customizable planner because having a full Saturday and Sunday would be the best thing ever, but it gave me an error message part way through, and it suddenly all felt like too much work when I could just order the Day Designer and be done with it. So that's what I did.
I still feel strange about changing planners. I really, really loved my other planner, but their tinkering made it too difficult for me to use any longer. I'll keep my eyes on them for 2023 and see if they streamline, but who knows? Maybe I'll love Day Designer so much that I never switch. We shall see.
Updates to come after I've lived with the planner for a while.
