I feel as if I should apologize in advance because I'm going to talk about planners again and this will be a two-part blog post. I've been doing a lot of thinking about planners lately. Sorry!
I received no compensation of any kind for this post and everything I talk about was purchased at full price with my own money.
I'm going to open this with a confession: I am a planner snob. My favorite planners have always been from boutique planner companies and the mass produced ones have never seemed to work for me.
I also have never been able to use a weekly planner. My brain just doesn't work that way. While I have a weekly component to my primary 2025 planner, I don't use it the way it's supposed to be used. I have a section for weather, a section to keep track of weekly tasks and projects, and another section to track my word count. My plans are on my daily pages, which I populate one week at a time, referencing my monthly pages.
Confession two: I've tried every author planner that I've seen being sold and the way those authors setup their planners, and the things they want to keep track of, largely don't work for me. I've abandoned every single one I've purchased.
And then the YouTube algorithm showed me an Erin Condren mid-year planner unboxing (well after the video was posted) with their new dashboard layout. I was intrigued, but talked myself out of it. I've tried and failed at too many weekly planners to think my ADHD brain will manage to handle life with this weekly. And then I had what is either a scathingly brilliant idea or an incredibly stupid one. What if I used it as my writing planner?
I already knew I'd need to tweak the layout a little because it makes more sense to me to have Monday through Thursday go down the left column and Friday through Sunday go down the right, rather than going left, right, left, right as the planner was setup. Otherwise, though, it could work. I decided to give it a try.
I picked up the 18-month minimal dashboard layout planner.
I immediately began setting it up how I think it will work for me. This process has been ongoing and I'm still printing stickers and tweaking things.
I printed out some Weekly Word Count stickers and some Monthly Goal and Monthly Review stickers.
It seemed to make sense to me to set monthly goals, and the end of the month to review how I did on those goals. This is going to be challenging for me because my goals tend to be lame, like write 5000 words. It feels like they should be something with steps involved to reach the goal. I'm still thinking about this.
I used stickers from Planner Kate to relabel the days. Like I said, it makes more sense to me to go down the left side and then down the right, rather than how Erin Condren set it up. Right now, I'm thinking I'll use the daily boxes to set my word count goals on one side of the flags, and what I actually wrote on the right side of the flags. I have no idea what I'm going to do with the notes section at the bottom.
I'm fuzzier on what to do with this page. This planner comes with six habit trackers and I know I don't need that many. In fact, I'm horrible using any habit tracker (I should write a blog post about my latest failure!), but maybe I can manage three. I'm thinking a word count goal, a time to be ready to work, and something else. Hmm. Anyway, I used a sticker to cover up three of the habit trackers and added a "Weekly Word Count" sticker. That's where I'll put my total for the entire week.
