Scathingly Brilliant Idea Fail X 2

I had a scathingly brilliant idea.

My daily list of things To Do included nine things that I do every day. It seems silly to write them and rewrite them. Especially when my planner features an entire section of habit trackers with a lot of lines. It includes the ability to track weekly or daily.

Hmm, I thought. Maybe I could list these daily items on the habit trackers and just check them off. That would be so much easier. I'd be writing things once a month instead of 28-31 times a month.

Never mind that I never use habit trackers because I forget they exist. This time it's going to work. I'm sure of it.

I got one of my small magnetic clips out to mark the page and I filled in the habit tracker with the things I need to remember to do every day. When I filled out my daily pages for the week, I left those items off the list. This was so much easier!

Until I forgot the habit trackers existed...just like I always do.

I made it about three days before I moved my daily items back to the daily pages.

There was more than my forgetting about the habit trackers at play here. The ones in my planner were big, allowing me to list a lot of items. It became hard to see what I was tracking because there were so many. And because there were so many, my ADHD brain became overwhelmed. I rarely remembered I was using them, and then when I did remember and flipped over, I was spinning. Not great.

Then I had another scathingly brilliant idea. What if I used a four-habits habit tracker? I could paste it on my weekly page. I always turn to my weekly section--it's where I record the weather. :-) This would get four things I do every day off my daily pages.

It's really amazing how a sticker can disappear on a planner page, isn't it?

After two habit tracker failures, I gave up. I'm back to writing my daily items on every daily page. It might be tedious, but at least this way I know I won't forget to do something that needs to be done. And no, I can't remember to meditate even though I do it every day. Yeah. Sigh.

Creating My Own Writing Planner: Part Two

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 didn't buy extra notes pages at the back of my Erin Condren dashboard planner and I ended up really regretting it because I ran out of space. Fast.

PlanSarahPlan on Etsy sells a blank notes page that can be put down over pages that have things on there you don't need, so I bought that and printed it out on sticker paper and laid it down over the monthly calendars I wasn't using at the front of the planner.

Because this planner is covering more than one year, I decided to put a list of Works In Progress at the front. If I'd realized how tight I was on notes pages, I would have combined this page with the next page, Future Projects. I really didn't need a full page for both of these, but the sticker paper I own is not repositionable, so two pages it is!

 

If this planner works like I hope, I'll know to 1) order an extra section of notes pages and 2) put these two sections on one page.

Every month, I want to set writing goals. There's a blank page next to the monthly notes page, so I added a sticker there.

 

I know this is something I need to figure out how to use. This is definitely a work in progress for me.

And if I'm going to set monthly goals, I should hold myself accountable, right? I need to come up with some review questions for myself.

The final page I have setup and ready to go is Blog Post Brainstorm.

Too often, I come up with ideas for the blog, and forget them because I have nowhere to write them down. Or, even better, I do write them down and then can't figure out where I wrote it. After I took the picture, I drew a line down the center to give myself more space. I'd originally planned to make this a double-page spread, but ran out of notes pages, so I used the second page for something else. There are more brainstorming pages in here for other things, but I didn't take pictures of those.

Honestly, I don't know if this is going to work or not. I'm hopeful because there's something about this layout that gives me structure, but allows me to make it what I want it to be. I hope it does work. I hope I'm excited every time I use this planner.

From next week until the end of 2025 will be all about experimenting, about finding what I need to keep track of beyond word count. I'm going to look through the abandoned author planners I bought and see if there's anything in those that I need to bring into this planner to make it work for me. I need to finish setting everything up this week. It doesn't need to be perfect, I just need to start the test run.

You know I'm going to update. :-) 

Creating My Own Writing Planner: Part One

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 my own name sticker on my Silhouette Cameo to add to the planner. I'm not usually a swirly font person, but this one works for me.

 

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.

 

There is a group of twelve boxes at the front of the planner. I put silver metallic washi tape down and then labeled each one with a month. I set it up for 2026 as I plan to use the rest of 2025 to experiment and see what works for me and what doesn't work for me.

 

I'll finish part one with a picture of how I setup the dashboard weekly page for September. Like I said, I'm late to this party, and I'm still not finished setting things up, but I hope to start using it soon.

 

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.

 

The To-Do section and the This-Week sections are also fuzzy. Yeah, I guess Priorities is fuzzy, too. Like I said, this is a work in progress. I'll adjust as I need to, but I'm hoping that having a separate writer planner will help keep me on track.

 

Stay tuned for what I did with the notes pages in the planner. 

(Sort Of) Mid-Year Planner Review

The planner community has a period in May/June (before the academic year planners come out) where many planner people reflect on what's working for them and what isn't. It's also a time of year when you might see people moving into new planners.

In May and June, I was working on revisions and edits for my July release, and when I wasn't working on revisions, I was doing the readathon. I wasn't paying attention and I have a planner system that was mostly working for me, so I ignored the mid-year reviews going on. And then I thought, you know, it might not be a bad idea.

I'm late. It's August, but here I am with my mid-year review.

FYI, I received no compensation of any kind for this post. I purchased everything I talk about here at full price. These are my true thoughts and opinions.

My 2025 Journey Planner remains fabulous! I bought the A5 size this year and I'll probably stay in the A5 next year, although it is tempting to try the B6. That's the sweet spot for me as far as size goes, but I like all the room I have in the A5 and I'm not sure I want to lose any of it.

Lessons learned in 2025: I would not put as many stickers on the daily pages as I did. I put holidays and moons and charge the fitness tracker and all kinds of stuff like this at the top of the daily page. I also wouldn't put washi tape across the bottom of every daily page. Or the birthday and anniversary stickers. While doing this in my former planner worked well, it's not as great in a planner with Tomoe River Paper and it made it difficult to write by mid year.

Lesson one: Less stickers and washi tape

The weekly section of the planner remains a work in progress (as I said earlier) I like putting the daily weather in at the top, and I like keeping track of my word count at the bottom, but the middle section remained a testing zone. I did learn that I prefer my reading for the week to be listed in the side bar rather than across the days.

You can see in this picture that I have the currently reading spread across the days. This is the problem with setting things up in advance. I'm stuck with a spread in November that I already know I don't like that well. Actually, I'm pretty sure I'm stuck with this until the end of the year.

Lesson two: Test things out before setting up the rest of the year.

With the Journey planner, I've used the monthly pages in ways I've never used my monthlies before. Including using itty bitty icons for when my lawn service comes, when I run the dishwasher, when I do laundry, or when I have a book club Zoom.

I've never been a huge icon fan, but these really small icons I found work for me really well. I'll do this next year, too. This alleviates some of the stress on the daily pages, especially as far as stickers go. It's also easier to look at the monthly page and say, my yard hasn't been cut in eleven days, rather than paging backward through the dailies.

Lesson three: Tiny icons rock

What didn't work this year: multiple planners. I thought it would be easier to keep track of monthly and weekly tasks if I had separate planners that I kept open all the time. That was not true. I did better once I moved everything from my monthly and weekly into my Journey planner.

I also learned that while I really like having a smaller, Everyday Carry (EDC) planner, I should have gotten a monthly booklet for this rather than a full weekly planner with notes pages. I'm only using the monthly pages in this planner, and when I take it with me, I'm only recording on the monthly pages. This will save hauling around more than I need. I still don't know what I'm going to do with those notes pages when the year is over.

Lesson four: One planner beats multiple planners

2025 was about testing new planners to see which one would work for me. Prior to this year, I'd been using the same daily planner for a decade. But I strained against the format of that planner, and every year it got worse and worse for me. The biggest problem was Saturday and Sunday sharing a page, but I had other problems, too. I outgrew this planner years ago, but wasn't ready to give it up.

Because I didn't know which planner would work best for me, I tried out a number of them. I didn't want to leave the ones I decided not to use empty, so I thought multiple journals! This did not work. I don't need four journals. One was enough. I decided it was okay to not finish those planners.

I also am using one of the extra planners as a duplicate to have on the other side of the house. I really like this planner. A lot. Except the year is split into two books and that is a deal breaker for me. It's already become a chore to sync this planner with my Journey planner. My idea of using it as a writing planner didn't work. It's too much planner for what I need for writing.

Lesson five: It's okay to not use planners that don't work for you

I have two more tests I'm running for the second half of this year. One is for a planner that might work as a writing planner because it's a lot less planner than the one I mentioned above. The second involves time blocking in addition to time tracking.

I will report more on this later. This post is already too long. 

The Weekly System Test

For the rest of the year, I'm going to test out a new weekly system for my planner. It's a modification of something I was doing the first half of the year. That system was mostly okay, but not perfect.

My planner has monthly, weekly, and daily pages. I've tried weekly planners previously (without daily pages) and knew they didn't work for me. That meant I wouldn't be using my weekly pages the way they were intended to be used.

The planner I'd used for the last ten years was a daily planner with monthlies. Now I had all these weekly pages and I didn't want to waste them.

Once I discovered a monthly sticker dashboard, I had my monthly planning set. The calendar pages were a quick overview and the dashboard was how I keep track of what I need to do that month. I did a thorough planner review in March and you can see the picture of my dashboard partway through the post. There are also pictures of the not-quite-right weekly system there.

 

 

This is my spread for a week in November. I used washi tape to separate my sections. The top is to record the weather. High and low temperatures and I have a stamp set for sunny, partly sunny, cloudy, etc.

 

The second section is where one of the changes happened. Because of how well the monthly dashboard worked for me, I wanted to find something along those lines, but not as large. I didn't need everything I used for the month. I finally found these box stickers. I'll add circles to the This Week box later for checking things off. The "Projects" and "This Week" stickers are separate and I put them over the top of the boxes.

 

Projects and This Week are not for writing, although in April and May when I was doing revisions for Wicked Ambition, I did use projects for writing then. When I'm writing the draft, there is a special section just to keep track of that.

 

The third section is brand new. I was keeping track of my reading on the daily page of my planner, but while that made sense in my old planner, it wasn't making sense in my current one. It got to be annoying trying to find what I was reading when and I spent a lot of time looking up this information on StoryGraph. So much simpler to give Reading its own section.

 

I had some leftover small (but not too small) boxes from sticker kits I'd partially used, so I put those down on the page to block out the times.

 

Another idea I'm going to try is listing the books read down the side of the weekly spread. I don't think it will be quite as helpful as the day by day breakdown shown above, but I tried out some longer boxes on some of the weeklies and there wasn't room for this extra section.

 

The bottom section is all about word count and word count goals. This is where I keep track of my writing. This is also a holdover from earlier in the year. This worked really well for me and I knew I wanted to keep it. I'd like some stickers instead of needing to write everything out, but those will bulk out the planner, so maybe not.

 

I'm hopeful this experiment works so that I'll be set for next year. I intend to buy this same planner again because it's nearly perfect. OMG! Such a welcome change from my old planner. I finally have the room I need to keep myself on track.

 

If this layout doesn't work, I'll have to brainstorm new suggestions for 2026.

A Conundrum of Minor Proportions

My primary planner has monthly pages, daily pages, and vertical weekly pages. I don't plan weekly because it doesn't work for me, but I use washi tape to split the page into three sections.

Section 1: The day's weather

Section 2: Weekly projects and things that need to be accomplished that week.

Section 3: Writing information. When I'm writing, I put my daily word count goal and what I actually wrote that day. When I'm revising, I just write "revisions" and keep it simple.

Section 3 is working really well for me, no changes required.

Section 2 is still a work in progress even this deep into the year. I keep trying different things. Keep in mind that I began the year with a separate weekly planner and that didn't work at all, so I pivoted quickly to this process. Having everything all in one book is the right answer, but now it's a matter of formatting.

Section 1 is where I'm confused. Not about keeping track of the high and low daily temperatures. That's easy enough. My question is the actual weather.

You see, I have a set of rubber stamps for Sunny, Partially Sunny, Cloudy, Rain, Thunderstorms, and Snow. The problem is what do I stamp. For example, the other day it began cloudy in the morning, then it was partially sunny, then it rained, then it was partially sunny again, and then the clouds returned.

What do I stamp? Rain? Cloudy? Partially Sunny?

I don't want to do multiple stamps. For one thing, there isn't room for it. For another, it would be overkill, and while I'm obsessive, I'm not this obsessive.

Should I do the most notable weather, which would be the rain? Should I do the vast majority of the day, which would be partially sunny? Should I do what it was like when I first woke up? That's cloudy. I'm so confused.

Chaos Reigns

There are a few things that cause me to struggle with my ADHD. Some of them I forget until the next time I run into the issue. Some are just obvious. My frustration now is about organization.

I want my office neat and organized. I hate writing in here with clutter and chaos everywhere, and yet I can't seem to find the energy to start tackling it.

It's overwhelming and that paralyzes me.

There's also finishing up my dad's bedroom. He lived with me for about seven years before he passed away so there was a lot of stuff. With help, I managed to handle most of it, but there's still a fair amount left to be done in there. Plus, I put a lot of my craft stuff in there to get it out of my office. Now not only is my dad's room loaded with his stuff, but it's now also loaded with craft supplies.

Another room that's overwhelming me now.

Then there's my closet, the pantry, the kitchen, and don't even ask me about the bonus room upstairs.

I had this idea of breaking things down to its smallest component and doing one tiny thing each week. I even took a notebook and created an entire theme for decorating it. And I haven't done much of anything with it.

Recently, I bought a spiral-bound workbook for organization. It has checklists and things like that. I haven't really looked through it yet. Until this book is completely finished and uploaded for its July release, I need to keep all my focus that direction, but I did glance at it and I'm worried it was a waste of money because some sections pertain to things that I don't need.

I guess we'll see when I have time to get there.

It's too bad professional organizers are out of my price range. With ADHD, I do better if I have someone working with me and that's what an organizer would do. They also cost the moon, so workbooks it is. Maybe even a few online videos.

Oops, I Did it Again

There are a lot of things that are a challenge for me because of ADHD. One of those things is the impulsiveness. And yes, it happened again.

I'm trying to get my house organized. My goal is to take care of it one small thing at a time. One of the things I've noticed is that I could use better under the sink storage in the master bathroom.

Heading online, I searched for solutions. There were some plastic pull-out drawers that looked as if they'd work. And no, I did not immediately throw them in my cart and purchase them. I planned to give it more consideration than that.

Until I got an alert that it was a lightning deal, and this was the lowest price these plastic bins had been in six months. Set of four? Should be perfect! Oh, and look! Those narrow storage bins I like are 50% off. I better order a set of six.

Everything arrived. The pull-out bins were easy to assemble. They're very nice bins. I like them. I can't fit four of them under my sink because of the other things I need to keep there, but I can fit two. And instead of saving me space, I now have less room than I had previously. I've had to shift multiple things around and other items like the cleaners had to come out of the basket I stored them in.

Sigh.

It does look neater under the sink. Things aren't falling everywhere, which is what I was dealing with before, but still. How do I lose storage space?

And the six pack of long, narrow storage bins? Yeah, I really didn't need six more of them, although if I ever get my pantry organized, those will work really well in there.

Lessons Learned

I thought I'd come up with alternate uses for the planners that were not going to work for me as actual planners. This has been an epic fail for me.

Item 1, the planner I thought I'd use as a memory planner. Sigh. It showed me how bad I am with inked stamps and that I don't feel like fighting this every day. Especially because (see item 2)

Item 2: I have four journals now that I have to record stuff in every day. FOUR. One is the Five-Year Diary, so it's not exactly a journal and serves (sort of) a different purpose, but this is like three too many.

I would be okay with the Five-Year Diary and one B6 sized journal, but I have an A5 journal and 2 B6 journals and OMG!

I keep telling myself I don't have to do this, that I can drop a couple of them. Unfortunately, my brain does not like this idea and the thought of abandoning them is untenable.

My solution for the memory planner is that next year I will buy stickers and redate the entire thing and use it in 2026. I will have to figure out how to cover up and re-use the pages I messed up trying to stamp, but I'm confident something will come to me.

On the journals? I'm just plugging along.

Item 3: The monthly planner was unneeded, and I've moved these items into my everyday planner.

Item 4: The weekly planner was also unneeded, and I've moved these items into my everyday planner.

Item 5: The EveryDay Carry (EDC) Planner. This is kind of working out for me. I like having it all on paper in front of me, and one of my weekly to-do items is to synchronize my planners. Um, I'm mostly successful with this. The one thing I don't like is this planner has a bunch of weekly pages and blank pages and I only need the monthly view. Next year I will buy a calendar booklet and not get an actual planner.

Item 6: the writing planner I wanted to try out, and thought would be my writing planner has turned into my secondary planner. As in it has all the items (or most of them anyway) from the everyday planner, but I keep this one on the other side of the house from the official planner. That way I don't have to run around to check my day.

I had hopes for this, but I've purchased actual author planners in the past and literally never used them even one day, so I'm not surprised. Plus, it's not a bad thing to have a reference handy. BTW, this planner would be totally awesome and a definite contender for everyday planner if it were one volume and not two. Two volumes are a deal breaker for me.

Item 7: the planner I tested, and thought would be my entertainment review book. Sigh. I had such high hopes for this one. I want to consume more entertainment, but I spend so much time writing that it's hard for me to find time to read for pleasure or even watch a movie. Especially when I have so many podcasts I enjoy listening to and they take up what little time I do have. Um, did I mention I'm over 120 episodes now on one of the podcasts I used to love?

And okay, I'm also spending way too much time writing in four journals to read or watch a movie. Gah! Four journals.

I'm sort of looking forward to 2026 when everything will be streamlined, and I won't be spending my entire life journaling.

Planner Review: Part 2

Just an FYI, I received no compensation of any kind for this post, and I paid full price for all my planners. My credit card is still unhappy about this fact.

On Tuesday, I talked about my 2025 planners, including the monthly, weekly, and the EveryDay Carry (EDC) planner. I also reviewed how those were working for me. Today, I review my daily planner selection. The winner is at the bottom!

Since I was switching from the planner I'd been in since 2015 to a new planner, I bought a number of different ones because I wasn't sure which one would work.

The Hobonichi Cousin in A5. It's fine. All the other planners I bought are boutique planners, so if worse came to worst and they ceased to be created, I could move into this planner. I'm not a huge fan of the quotes because they squeeze the page, the colors are not my choices, and the timeline on the daily pages is not usable for me, but I found a shop that sells a sticker timeline that goes over it and I can deal with the rest. If I had to.

Hemlock & Oak Dated Daily. Hemlock & Oak makes a really nice, nice planner. I used it as a daily journal in 2024 and loved the hell out of it. This is the only planner I tried for 2025 that didn't have Tomoe River Paper, but a thick, regular paper that doesn't show any bleed through and I also have zero ghosting. I still love this planner for journaling, but I don't think I would want it for my daily planner. It's in an A5 size and is thick and heavy. I don't carry my desk planner with me, so this wasn't a deal breaker for me and there's plenty of room to write. I'll continue this as a journal.

Sterling Ink Daily Planner A5 and B6. I really like Sterling Ink planners. I had a weekly for 2024 that I journaled in, and I enjoyed it immensely. My weekly was a B6, and I like that size, but I wasn't sure it would be big enough. The B6 might be a little small for me because I would have to record my water, vitamins, etc. in here on the daily page. The A5 has more room. The biggest drawback for me is this planner has no weekly pages--only monthly and daily.

Plans by Just Scribble Horizontal in A5. I really, really like this planner, and if it were in one volume, it would be a contender for my winner. Unfortunately, it's in two volumes and that's a deal breaker for me. I'm using it as a secondary everyday planner. As in it's a reminder for me to glance out when I'm on the other side of the house, but it's not my primary planner. I'm hoping that for 2026, there's a single volume option.

What I like about this planner is that instead of being setup with all the months together, then all the weeks, and then all the days, Plans has it setup so that the month comes, then the week, then the 7 daily pages for that week, then the next weekly pages, then the next 7 daily pages, and so on. I like this setup a lot. I also love the horizontal weekly setup with the blank page. This planner is so awesome! But as I said, two volumes are a deal breaker for me. I need/want one book. I'm not looking for portability in my official planner. That's what my EveryDay Carry planner is for.

The winner for me is Nisha Fernando Designs Journey Planner in A5. I found this planner late, after their preorder closed, but as soon as I saw it, I was like, I think this planner would be perfect for me! And I was right.

What I like about this planner: It has an entire section to record meals. It also has space for water and vitamins. I adjusted it slightly because I take medication for my acid reflux with every meal, so I needed AM/Noon/PM and not the single vitamin dose the planner offered. It was a simple fix. There's also a section off to the right (not in the picture) that I was able to adjust to record how much sleep I was getting every night. And there's the little barbell to check off workouts. Win!

All planners have a monthly section, so nothing unusual here.

I decorated my monthly page with washi tape. February was a nice, light month. All the monthly reminders are out of the picture. If you look closely, you can see some ghosting. That's that Tomoe River Paper does, but that doesn't bother me at all. I love the crinkly texture of this paper, and the major win is that I can have the room and pages I need in one book because of how thin the paper is.

This is a vertical weekly planner which I work around with washi tape and stickers. I don't plan in my weekly pages because my brain doesn't process information in this mass of days. I tried weekly planners before switching to daily and it was too easy to ignore everything when it was all lumped together.

Here's a picture I sent a friend to show her what I was doing. I used thin washi tape to divide the page. At the top, I'm keeping track of the temperature, and I have a stamp set for sun or rain or clouds that I use up there as well. The bottom section is for word count. My goal is 1000 words a day. I record what I actually wrote below the goal.

The most important section is the "THIS WEEK" part on the middle right. This is where I record any weekly tasks that need to be done. Since this picture was taken right after I setup the planner, I only have the four tasks I want to do every week.

There wasn't enough space on the side bar of the monthly pages (above) to keep track of my monthly To-Do list, so I needed a work around. The Journey Planner has a blank page at the beginning of each month of daily pages. I found a sticker company, Mandy Lynn Plans (again, no compensation was received by me.) that makes monthly dashboards. Problem solved.

The colors of the stickers are much more vibrant than the picture shows. Apologies for being a horrible photographer.

The sticker kit gives me a variety of options for the headings on each section, but the ones I use every month are "This Month," "Important Dates," "Goals," and "Notes." There are tasks I do every month like my newsletter. Important dates can be things like doctor appointments or holidays. Goals are whatever I want to do that month. The important section for me is "This Month." I put check marks in the circles to the left as I complete an item.

And last, but certainly not least since this is the most important for me. The Daily Pages.

You can see the thinness of the Tomoe River Paper in this picture because the stickers on the other side of the page are clearly silhouetted there. Stickers are from the Scooby Doo collection from Capitol Chic Designs (Again, I received no compensation for this post. I bought my stickers from this shop.)

The timeline is printed on the left side of the page and goes from 6am to midnight. There's space above the 6am, so if I need to write something in earlier, I can. Same with space below midnight. There are small marks to divide the page, but I didn't want it halved, so I took a light marker and drew a line down the page to separate the timeline from my daily To-Do list.

I was going to use a dot marker to create check circles to mark off when I accomplished an item, but I discovered that the ghosting was too much, and I switched to a highlighter with a square nib.

I've done other little things to the planner. I've added tabs to all the sections. I've decorated my pages because the A5 allows me room to do that. There's also a section full of trackers, but I've found that I don't really keep up with trackers, so I'm haphazard on using them.

This planner is amazing for me. It gives me the space to have everything in one place and to organize it in a way that makes sense to me and works with my brain. I found my new everything planner and I'm so grateful it exists.

Planner Review: Part One

This year is the year I changed planners for the first time since 2015. The planner I was using was a daily spiral book with Saturday and Sunday sharing a page. I was pushing against that shared weekend page from literally the first day I got the planner, but it had so many other cool features like a place to track water and meals and vitamins and meditation and things like this that I put up with it.

2024, though, was my breaking point.

This was my first full year after my dad died. He'd lived with me since 2016, after my mom passed away, and while I kept track of daily things, he kept track of longer-term items.

With him gone, I needed to stay on top of everything myself which meant my planner needed to do more and be more because I was diagnosed with ADHD, and I cannot rely on my memory.

I always knew I needed to write things down. I've always created workarounds and systems, but I also always had my parents to remind me of things that fell through the cracks in my brain. Without that, my planner needed to do this. My usual planner suddenly was too small, too unusable for what I needed.

I went to a fine-point pen. I wrote two items per line. I manipulated that thing every way I could think of trying to make it work. By September of 2024, I realized I needed a new solution. This planner would never work for me again.

Just so you know, I paid full price for all the planners I mention here. There is no sponsorship of any kind involved.

In 2025, I ordered a ridiculous number of planners. I thought I would need a monthly, a weekly, and a daily all open at the same time, so I purchased one of each. I also bought an EveryDay Carry (EDC) planner.

My monthly was a Sterling Ink B5. The weekly a Sterling Ink B6, and the EDC was a Sterling Ink N2 (which is the same size as the Hobonichi Weeks). I also bought multiple daily planners, uncertain which one would work for me. My options were: Hobonichi Cousin A5, Sterling Ink Daily Planner A5 and B6, Hemlock & Oak Daily Planner, Plans by Just Scribble, and then I spotted Nisha Fernando Design's Journey Planner. It looked perfect for what I needed, and I ordered it in A5 size.

What I learned: I do not want a separate planner for my monthly and weekly views. Instead of being helpful for me, it was annoying. The planner that's become my everyday planner has monthly and vertical weekly pages and I'm using that instead of the planners I bought.

The EDC is good. It's better for me to make appointments and ensure I'm not double booking myself from a paper planner than from my phone. Yes, I do still add everything to my phone, just in case, but my brain just registers commitments better on paper. With the caveat that I have a weekly task to synchronize that planner to my primary planner so that there are no oopsies.

Next blog post will look at my daily planners.

In My Face

The picture is of the kanban board I have on my office wall. The gold word was my word of the year like three or four years ago. It is off my wall. This is an archived image from shortly after I finished writing Wicked Suspicion. So while I was late taking it down, I did get it done.

March is the last month of the first quarter of 2025, and that means I'll have to pull down all the Post-it Notes in my finished section. I do this at the end of every quarter.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, if I had left all my book Post-its on the wall, it would get pretty full. On the other, I hate when I look over at my wall and see nothing in the Finished section. Looking at the picture accompanying this post, you can see all the finished chapters from the last book.

As I glance over now, I can see all the chapters I've finished so far this quarter. I love this! And in a few weeks, they will all be off my wall and in the trash. Sadness.

My kanban board is actually one of the most useful tools I have to keep myself on track. Sure, I've got word count trackers and other a project management spreadsheet that I use, but if I don't open the files, I don't see them. And one of the issues with ADHD is out of sight, out of mind. This board is impossible to ignore. I have to look at it every time I leave my office. Which is exactly what I need.

Planner Updates

I thought I'd update on my planner collection for 2025. I'll go more in-depth on some of these later. This is just a really general overview.

The planner I chose as my new everyday planner was one I spotted late, after I'd chosen another everyday planner. I decided to pick it up anyway, and it ended up being a good choice. It has all the features I want, or space to set them up, and it has the big feature. Full pages for both Saturday and Sunday.

This planner came in two sizes. A5 and B6. I bought the A5 because I wanted maximum space, but I might be able to downsize next year to the B6. As it stands, right now I have plenty of room to decorate with washi tape and stickers.

The other impulse purchase planner has so many cool features, but it's in two volumes so it doesn't work as my everyday planner. My big wish is that next year it is in one volume. No one buys an A5 for portability, so splitting them into two volumes was unnecessary, especially since it also comes in the ultra-portable A6 size.

My plan was to use this planner for writing-related tasks and word counts, but I haven't done that yet. In fact, the only thing I've done is tip in vellum with the names of the months. I need to figure something out before the year passes.

I'm using the backup everyday planner for journaling. Sometimes I use a prompt. Sometimes I just record what's on my mind. Not quite a brain dump, but along those lines.

My weekly horizontal planner has tasks that need to be done that week, but don't need to be done on a specific day. I bought this in B6 which means it's nice to cart around with me. Next year, I might combine the journal with the weekly because I don't think I need both.

I bought some Travelers-size booklets for time tracking. With my ADHD, it's too easy for me to think ten minutes have passed when it's two hours. I'm hoping tracking will help me stay focused. Next year, I can do that in my new everyday planner because it has the vertical weekly included in it.

Speaking of vertical weeklies, I picked up a Hobonichi Cousin to try out, too. I'm using it as an entertainment planner. Anything I read, watch, listen to, or whatever gets recorded in the planner. I've bought sticker kits to decorate it, and if everyone drops out of the boutique planner sphere (which is what my two choices for everyday planners are. Boutique planners), I know Hobonichi is big enough to still be around. The Cousin would definitely work with some sticker help.

You're probably thinking wow, that's a lot of planners, Patti. WTF?

I have struggled all my life with ADHD, although I wasn't diagnosed until 2024. I always thought I was a lousy adult until I found out it was my brain, not a failing on my part. Looking back, it's also obvious how much my parents helped prop me up, even after I moved to Atlanta, and they were still in Minneapolis. After my mom died, my dad moved in with me and propped me up even more because he was on-scene to handle things.

I took care of everything day to day. My planner helped me stay on top of those items. But things at irregular intervals? Those my dad either took care of or reminded me about handling them. After he died, I struggled badly enough to get tested for ADHD.

I bought multiple planners because I'm hoping to come up with a system to keep me on track. This year is about testing things out, hence the number of planners. As I use them this year, I'm finding ways to combine functions into fewer planners. I'll also be able to rule out the things that don't work and brainstorm different ways to stay on track.

Right now, I'm thinking I'd only need two planners for next year, but testing will continue all year.

A Possibly Scathingly Brilliant Idea

I maybe had a brilliant idea today for how to organize the supplies I use all the time in my planners, my notebooks, and my writing notebooks.

Rolling craft cart!

Okay, so I have one rolling craft cart already. I'm using it for knitting and crocheting stuff. I also made an error in judgment and ordered the deluxe craft cart with the hooks on the side and the rollers for like wrapping paper. I use those for vinyl for my cutting machine.

The problem with the deluxe cart is that those side attachments, particularly the hooks, are dangerous. They also fall off constantly.

When I had my light bulb moment about using a craft cart for my notebook supplies, I immediately thought of moving all my knitting and crocheting stuff somewhere else and using that cart. And then I remembered the hooks and other side attachments and went, yeah, no.

I found a regular rolling cart on sale today and with a coupon for $3 off and decided to give it a try. It's possible this idea isn't quite as brilliant as I believe it to be, but I'll give it a shot when it arrives. One of the features to this cart that I like is it has a handle to allow you to push the cart where you want it. This makes me believe it might be easier to roll than the deluxe cart I already have.

I like doing my notes and planners at my kitchen table, but I'm so tired of pens and stickers and rulers all over the place. This cart gives me hope I can corral everything on it, including my caddies with my notebooks and planners.

Hopefully, this will be easy to roll out of sight when someone comes over without me needing to make multiple trips back and forth to my office with arms full of office supplies.

Organizing Books on Apps

Okay, as I was writing last Thursday's blog post, I had something pop into my head and decided to write this post right away before I forgot all about it.

How in the world do you organize your eBooks?

I have a major disaster on my hands and literally spend forever trying to find which book to read. I have so many books on multiple reading apps (Kindle/Kobo/Book Funnel/Etc.) and nothing is categorized or organized.

How do I sort things when I've been collecting eBooks for years and haven't organized anything? How do I even start to sort out this mess?

The other night, I had some free time, and I wanted to read a book. I knew I had just downloaded a couple that were intriguing, and I'd been excited to read. Then I went into the app, and I didn't know which ones they were. I kept opening book descriptions and reading them, but I never found any of the stories I was looking for.

I'm sure everyone else must have a system in place. It must be only me with this chaos.

Before and After

I thought I'd share some before and after pictures of my weekly 2024 planner. It's Tomoe River Paper (TRP) and this was the first time I'd used it. As it turned out, I absolutely love this paper even though it's much thinner than the normal 80-pound paper my daily planner had.

Originally, I bought this planner for 2024 to help me keep track of my dad's appointments, but he passed away at the end of 2023 and I didn't really do much with the planner for most of the year.

Then August happened. I suddenly looked at the 365+ blank pages behind the weekly spreads and went GAH!

I began journaling to use up the blank pages.

And then I began decorating the planner with stickers and washi tape and vellum. I tipped in a whole lot of vellum paper because I liked how pretty it was, and I had a pack of vellum so I could print my own.

And the more I decorated the book, the more I used it, and I started carting it along with me everywhere. It's a B6 size, so much more portable than my official A5 spiral planner.

For 2025, I am using another Tomoe River Paper planner. This one will have a lot fewer decorations because it's my every day, official 2025 planner. I'll put in occasional stickers, but not much more than that. I did, however, buy another weekly planner and that one I plan to decorate like I did this one.

Are you ready for the before and after pictures and how I chunked up my 2024 planner?

Side view of my 2024 planner as received.

Side view of my 2024 planner around August. Before I started decorating it like mad.

And here are three views of my chunked up, finished 2024 planner:

Front view. You can see I put a bunch of Post-it flags/tabs in there to mark different things I wanted to find again.

Side view of my chunked-up planner. The gold coating is still on the edges of the pages, but you can't see it because of the chunk.

Top view. More tabs to flag out things I want to find again. Also, I'm using Oli Clips to mark out the different sections. The first one is for the monthly pages, the second it for the weekly pages, and I used the final one to keep track of where I was writing.

I think it's wild how much thicker this planner became in the year I used it. Actually, in the final five months that I used it because before August, it remained close to how it arrived. This was just so much fun to decorate, and while I don't feel like I want to do this to my official planner for 2025, I am looking forward to chunking up my weekly B6 planner. I wonder if I can get it chunkier than 2024's version?

Trial and Testing

As I write this post, I still don't have my number one choice to replace my regular daily planner. That planner had an extremely late in the year ship date, and because I missed the first preorder, I'm at the end of the queue to receive this planner. It's wreaking havoc with my need to set things up well in advance.

It's frustrating, but understandable that the people who ordered first get their planners first, but I do so much set up that waiting is hard for me. I have tabs to add, and I need to put in birthdays and anniversaries, stickers for garbage day and watering plants and charging my Fitbit. Well, there are just a lot of things I do that take time.

I do have Option B and Option C if needed, but I can't set either of those up in case I need to use them for something other than my daily planner.

In the meantime, I've been testing things out in case the planner I'm waiting for doesn't work. I've done some messing around in my 2024 weekly planner's blank page section and discovered that if I needed to handwrite in the sections that my current daily planner has, that I'd be fine with it.

Using a dot marker instead of having boxes isn't as neat looking and writing in the sections for water, sleep, meditation, vitamins, and meals also aren't as nice as having everything pre-printed for me, but I honestly cannot spend another year in my 2024 daily planner. I'm chafing over the lack of space, especially on the weekends.

I also have stamps I could try out if Option A, the planner that has yet to arrive, doesn't work.

As an aside, the reason why the daily planner I am abandoning in 2025 has Saturday and Sunday sharing a page (SHARING!) is because they insist on putting in grocery list pages. 

Who makes out their grocery lists in a planner? Do people really do this? And if they do, why? I have apps on my phone for the two grocery stores I shop at. Both have list features. I add what I want to the list, and it tells me where that item is located right down to the aisle number. Who would use a paper list when they can use an app with all the features?

I wish I'd realized earlier that I could live with the handwritten sections I created in my weekly planner. If I'd known that, I would have abandoned the PITA planner this year instead of waiting for 2025. It's too late now since I nearly completed the year. It will be the planner of record for 2024 and then I'm done with that brand forever.

I'm sort of sad about what happened to my former favorite planner. It used to be awesome! I used to be so excited to use it, but the shared weekend was always an issue and then they started making changes to the weekday pages, shrinking the list section farther and farther with each revision until I simply ran out of room to plan my life. Now I mostly just get frustrated with it. Frustrated with having to write two items on each line in order to squeeze into it.

2025 is the end of my frustration! I'm sure the new planner won't be perfect either, but at least I'll have full pages for Saturday and Sunday. I'll figure everything else out.

Waiting for 2025

One of the planners I'm considering for the official desktop planner is a Hobonichi Cousin. I have it already and it's sitting in its cover directly to my right.

I want to use it now.

Every day, I hate my usual planner more and more. There simply isn't enough space on any day of the week without writing two items on one line, and the weekends are worse because they share a page. I'm chafing against the restriction.

The Cousin isn't even my first choice for my new official planner. That hasn't arrived yet, although it should be coming soon.

I keep telling myself that I'd have to duplicate information anyway because the official desktop planner gets archived. It's my record of my year, the mundane and the exciting. I'm not going to rewrite 11 months of information from my current daily planner into a new one, so even if I could pick up a 2024 Cousin for a few bucks, I'm not doing it.

My first choice for new official planner: Not here yet. My second choice is here, but it's not as if I'm going to set it up until I know whether or not option one will work. Third choice is the Cousin. There would be a lot of set up for it, too, that's why I'm hoping option one works out. It will require a lot less work.

My Cousin in its cover, ready to go should the first two options fail me.

There would have been a fourth option, one that would have probably been at the top of the list, but it got disqualified because it's two volumes. I want everything in one book. This isn't a planner I carry with me. It stays at home on my desk.

My 2025 Everyday Carry is a Sterling Ink Weeks Size Compact. The compact means there's only 119 blank pages at the back of it instead of 367. This planner is light and easy to tote around, but it's not the official planner. Not the one that gets archived for memory keeping.

I'm really, truly trying to stop talking about planners, but it's hard when I hate my current planner so, so much and have been dying to jettison it since September. I'll try to do better.

Just When I Thought This Planner Couldn't Get Any More Messed Up

I swore to myself that I was not going to do another planner post. At least not for a little while. But...

But the first planner from my preorders arrived and I am not happy.

The planner that arrived is the one that's been my everyday planner since 2016. I've complained about it before, tried to move off of it and into another daily planner before, but have always ended up back in it because it has little icons printed on each page to track water, vitamins, meditation, exercise, etc. I love those features!

But among my many issues with this planner, Saturday and Sunday share a page and those are my two busiest days of the week. I actually have to jam two items per line to get it to work for me.

And last year a new hell came into play. They used to print the same day on the same side of the page all the way through. As an example, the Saturday/Sunday combo page was always on the lefthand side. Last year, they didn't do that, and my days were flying around to any side. Did not like. But it was only a couple of months.

And then there was this year's planner. Five months have Saturday/Sunday on the left, and seven months have it on the right.

There have been a number of changes throughout the years that I haven't liked. For example, they keep adding sections below the To Do list side of the page and taking away real estate from my list. They've added all kinds of things that I do not use and do not want like what I'm reading. If I want to list what I'm reading in my planner, I have stickers for that. I need my To Do List section more than I need to record the book I'm reading.

I'd already made plans to try to get myself into a different daily planner for 2025 and now I'm going to try harder. I really do not want to buy this planner again.

I tried stickers in another daily a few years ago when I tried to change, and the bulkiness was an issue. This time around I'm going to try stamps. We'll see how it goes. I might have to abandon the icons and keep track of water some other way. I have ideas.

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.