I've started setting up my 2026 planners!
This year, I picked up my usual B6 for journaling. The color is mulberry, just like last year, and I love it. It's this maroon color that has a richness to it.
I prefer to journal in a planner because there are enough pages to have one for each day of the year, and if something extra comes up, I can always go back to the horizontal weekly section and use that space, too. Plus, it has the year on it and I keep my journals.
My primary planner for the year is an A5 Sterling Ink Complete Planner. (No compensation of any kind! I paid full price for my planner.) This is the planner that might actually work for me as an all-in-one.
In 2025, I used a Journey Planner (No compensation of any kind! I paid full price for my planner.) and I loved it! I still love it. But I'm still struggling with my weekly to-do lists in this planner. I'm going to hate losing the meal planning section she has because OMG, it's fabulous, but Complete will give me more room. Enough that I will be able to have a weekly dashboard every week.
It was the monthly dashboard stickers I used in my 2025 A5 Journey Planner that solved my monthly to do list issues, so I'm hoping a weekly dashboard will do the same for me.
And then I had a thought. I have a machine that cuts stickers. I could make them for my Complete Planner. I'm not a vertical weekly planner girlie, and I used the vertical weekly this year to record the weather, my word counts, and tried to capture weekly tasks here. The weekly task part didn't work, but the other things did fine. I counted lines and decided I could recreate the Journey Planner meal layout (more or less) in my Complete. I got to work with my sticker cutter.
You can see I labeled the bottom section: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Snacks, Meds, and Water. This is similar to the Journey Planner meal planning/health section. I was hoping to print out little water drops and cross them off for water consumption, but that attempt failed and I figured I can just add a tick mark for each cup I drink. I do have a stencil that fits the Sterling Ink layout, but the drops are so small that it might be hard to slash through them anyway.
And here is the same page after I drew lines to show where the breaks between the different meals are. I didn't want to do this because I am challenged to draw a straight line even with a ruler, but it looked like a sea of nothingness and I didn't like that. Now I'm debating adding vertical lines, but I haven't made a decision yet.
In the sidebar, I'll also track my reading for the week. That's what I was doing in Journey this year and I really liked that.
I haven't setup the weekly dashboard yet. I'm thinking I'll do a really wide washi tape across the top and add the dates for the week. I'd like a To Contact section for phone calls and emails because those slide right out of my mind. Also a section for a To Do List and a couple of small boxes. Maybe projects or Remember or important dates.
At least this is my current plan. I've decided to do one week at a time once I start setting up dashboard pages, so that I can tweak as needed.
This planner also has two pages to wrap up the month. I have a mini-bookshelf for each month where I can record the books I finish. It might not be big enough some months, but other months? I just don't read much while I'm doing a lot of writing. I think I'll put this here. Now I need to figure out what else I need in the monthly summary/wrap up section.
There's always so much work to do to set up a new planner and I'm doing things differently this year, hoping it will make things even better, but it also means additional work. We'll see how I like the new things.
You guys know I'll be sharing more as the setup progresses.
