Worldwide giveaway: Travel Journal

Enter here to win this Travel Plan journal!

This A5 size travel journal has a unique layout allowing you to record your travel experiences quickly and easily.

There are lots of other features too, click here to read my review with lots of photos and details of the features of this book.

Here's how to enter:

1. This giveaway is open to everyone worldwide. Post a comment here, your comment is your entry. Only one entry per person.

2. This giveaway will close Sunday March 3rd at 6:00 pm London time. Any entries posted after that time will not be counted.

3. The winner will be generated via Random.org.

4. The winner's name will be posted here on Plannerisms on Monday March 4. Don't forget to check back Monday to see if you won!!

5. The winner will email me so I can send you your prize. If I don't receive an email from the winner by Friday March 8, I will randomly generate a new winner.

Good luck everyone!

Bound planner work-arounds: Planner Pad Insta-Pocket

What a great invention! Any planner, notebook or book can have a pocket!

The Planner Pad Insta-Pockets come in a few different sizes, and in front or back pocket versions. You just peel off the backing and stick the pocket into your book.

My new Time Traveler day per page planner didn't have a pocket in the back, so I trimmed an Insta-Pocket to fit and now I have a place to tuck papers! Yay!

(Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Planner Pad in any way. I was just really psyched to be able to put a pocket in my book! I ordered this Insta-Pocket last year with the Planner Pad that I reviewed here.)

All Planner Pad products can be found at www.plannerpads.com.

Guest post: How Stephanie uses her Filofax and Plannerisms planner together

Many thanks to Stephanie for this post (with so many detailed photos!) on how she is using her Filofax and Plannerisms planner together!

I've been a loyal (aka fanatic) filofax user for over a year but at the beginning of 2013 I decided to give the Plannerisms planner a try after reading about all it’s goal planning pages. It's been in use along with my personal sized filofax since the beginning of the year and I couldn't be happier with my new system. I use both books on a daily basis and I feel like my organization and productivity is improved rather than hindered by keeping a two-book system.

So without further ado here are the two planners and how they work together (the third book in the photo, the brown notebook is where I planned out my goals at the beginning of the year with lots of writing and planning and notetaking. It only gets pulled out from time to time when I update goals).

First up is the beautiful Adelphi Filofax. I got it second-hand for $40 dollars, it still had the $100 price tag on it when I purchased it, score!

I have a 9-5 day job as a project analyst/technical writer, write a baking column for The Globe and Mail, run my baking blog Clockwork Lemon, and manage a 4-plex building with my boyfriend. I need my filofax everyday to help keep all my tasks and to-dos sorted out. It comes with me everywhere and lives in my purse or on my desk

When I first open the filo it has my zippered pocket that I added fabric to and keep all of the fortune cookie fortunes that I like in. Then the filo is organized with top tabs and side tabs. The top tabs have the category and the side tabs break them down into smaller topics to make everything easy to find:

Top Tab:

Month: monthy pages. I transfer any info on these over to my Plannerisms planner if I need to write down a date while I'm out and about 

Weekly: weekly pages. I only use these pages on Monday when I make a big list of all the tasks that need to get done. It's like a weekly to-do list. Then I sort out the tasks and slot them on to the weekly pages of my plannerisms book.

Daily: The most used pages in my filofax. Its just cotton cream filo paper that I stamped with a to-do stamp and a frame stamp where I write the date. I didn't pre-date the pages because sometimes the tasks span a couple of pages. I make a new list everyday and they just contain the tasks that need to get done that day. If something doesn't get completed I cross a line through it and write it out on the next page to be completed tomorrow.

I only keep about 10 - 15 To-Do pages in my filo. When it starts feeling too full I take out the used ones, make sure they don't have phone numbers or dates on them that I need, and then recycle them.

 Blog: The section used for planning blog posts. It's separated into side tabs for:

•     Future: Pages and pages of ideas for future posts, flavor combinations, notes
•     Upgrades: Master to-do list of upgrades that need to be done to my blog, corrections to old blog posts ect.
•     To-Do: Homemade To-Do sheets that help me keep track of my posts. I often bake and photograph posts ahead of time. There are usually a couple of posts in progress at anytime and it's nice to see at a glance where they are at.

Column: broken into side tabs for

•     Future: Future column ideas and any notes from emails with my editor
•     Invoices: A finance sheet for tracking my invoices.

Work: broken into side tabs for

•     Finances: some of my projects are commission based so there are sheet tracking commission project and upcoming audits
•     Tenants: General info sheets such as mailing addresses, phone numbers, at-a-glance lease information for our tenants
•     General Info: Sheets for my most-used phone numbers, wireless passwords, printed out schedules for the fitness classes I like

Next up is my Plannerisms planner. I chose the basic black and then coloured the sides of the paper silver with a large metallic marker..

.. and used a gold marker to doodle a bit on the inside as well.
The plannerisms planner lives in my laptop bag or in my desk. It doesn't get carried around in my purse but I do use it every day including weekends.
The yearly and quarterly goal pages were filled out at the beginning of the year and I reference them each month when I'm making my monthly goals.

I love having the big monthly pages in the plannerisms planner. My biggest gripe with my filo had always been the small boxes in the personal sized monthly pages. I use the monthly pages to plan out when I'm away for meetings, my test-batch baking for recipe development, which days I'm photographing food, blog post dates, and column deadlines etc.
On the grey side bar I put which projects I need to complete for my day job during the week.

On the monthly goals page I plan out how many commission projects I want to complete, blog posts, social media, big tasks that need to get done that month etc. At the end of the month I review which goals I completed and fill them out on a piece of notepaper that gets attached with a piece of washi tape. It's a good way to see what was acheived at a glance, plus I use the notepaper to make a little tab that says the name of the month on it for easy reference.

I use the weekly pages along with my daily filo pages. The filo pages contain the tasks specific to that day while the plannerisms pages have appointments and the tasks that I do over and over on a daily and weekly basis.

The sidebar breaks up each day into sections with tasks that need to be done each week. The sections are:

Health: Tracking water, what fitness class I'm taking and when, if we ate at home or not

Baking: Which recipes need to be tested and on which days

Blog+ Column: what I need to photograph, write, and which social media I need to check in with

Work Tasks: Any major tasks/deadlines for the week

Productivity: One of my major goals for the year is being productive as possible so I rate my morning and afternoon productivity Monday-Friday

Cleaning: which room in the needs cleaning/has been cleaned so that our poor bathroom doesn't end up going a month without being cleaned. As you can see, this week nothing has been cleaned .. sigh.

Evening Tasks/Prepping: If I need to buy ingredients for baking the next day, pack my camera, workout bag, or if I'm meeting people in the evening. I fill these in on Monday and then update them during the week.

The bottom part of the pages are used to list upcoming deadlines and which Chinese dishes I'm making that week. I'm learning how to cook Chinese food and my goal has been to make two new dishes each week. I keep notes on how the dishes turned out and whether we liked the recipe or not.

In the back pocket of the planner I keep sheets of stickers that I use when my rolls of washi tape aren't on hand and I need to block off dates for out-of-town meetings.

When I write in the plannerisms planner I always ALWAYS use my Frixion pen (the blue flowered pen in the photo) because it's erasable and it makes moving dates and tasks around a breeze. I had doubts about how well it would erase, but it works perfectly.. if I could buy these pens in bulk I would. In the filofax I use my favorite pen which was handmade from pinewood.

Dream team! I love using the two books together. In the past I really found it hard to keep track of goals and forward plan in my filofax, but a bound book didn't have the flexibilty to keep track of all the information for my different jobs. They rarely get carried together in the same bag (filo in my purse, plannerisms with my laptop) so it's not a chore to have two books with me. It's been almost two months and I don't feel like the system needs any tweaking or changing and I've noticed that weekly tasks no longer fall to the wayside when I'm working on a deadline because the plannerisms pages remind me that they need to be fitted in. Thanks for the great planner Laurie!

Many thanks again to Stephanie! I love seeing how people use the Plannerisms planner, everyone uses it differently and it's exciting to me to see how people use my design.

Time Traveler 2013 day per page planner

Here is the Time Traveler 2013 day per page planner in Firenze Red that I hope will solve my day per page dilemma! I've been going back and forth for months on which day per page planner to use, and I really hope this will be The One. I've used and loved Time Traveler day per page planners in the past so I have high hopes for this one!

This planner is approximately A5 size, nearly 6 inches wide by 8 1/2 inches tall closed. It's nearly an inch wider than my large Moleskine day per page planner:

I love the wider pages, that extra almost-inch on each page makes a huge difference in writing space!

It has a full page for every day, even Saturday and Sunday (which is very important to me).

Times are printed down the side from 8 am to 7 pm with lines for the half hours too. Below 7 pm are several lines for scheduling later in the evening or notes. Holidays are printed on the day pages. At the bottom of the page are month calendars for the entire year with the current month highlighted.

There are also month per page calendars, which are so hard to find in day per page books!

**Update: I'm using these daily spaces in the monthly calendars as a reference of events similar to how Patty uses her Franklin Covey Index Pages.

Holidays for the US and Canada are printed on the days.

 The cover is so soft and flexible! I love to touch it.

I tried to get a shot of the texture of the cover. It's very soft and feels really nice in my hands. I'm very tactile so this is very important to me!

There are TONS of features in this planner. Here are just some:

Planning calendars and holidays for the current year and next two years:

 International holidays, weights and measurements:

I really like this page: birthdays and anniversaries. I'll write birthdays and gift ideas on the lines. My daughter is interested in the signs of the zodiac and is always asking me which signs are for which birthdates, and I never remember. Luckily now I have this information in my book!

 I really like this page too. I'll write my kids' sizes so when I'm out and about and see something on sale I'll know I'm getting the right size!

There are also pages with international dialing codes, US area codes, websites and toll-free numbers.

 At the back of the book there is a Forward Planner for all of next year:

Directory pages are bound into the book:

There are a few Notes pages:

Then come the maps! As we all know, I love maps in planners, and Time Traveler planners have some of the best maps. Here is their very accurate Time Zones map, which even shows Nepal is 5 hours 45 minutes ahead of GMT. Most time zone maps don't show this level of detail!

 Gorgeous world map!

 US map:

 And there are maps of every continent!

 Look at this Europe map!

 There's even a map of the North and South Poles! And that's just some of the maps.

Here is the back of the planner, with Time Traveler subtly embossed on the back. I love the red color, which is a little lighter in my photos than in real life, and the stitching. It's colorful yet subtle, and professional looking.

I love the smooth, white paper. I don't have fountain pens, but I did a pen test with my wettest inks. I was especially concerned about the Uni-ball Signo RT, which is usually a problem child on paper because it's so wet.

On extreme closeup, the only ink that had any feathering at all is the Sakura, and even that is not very noticeable.

The show-through to the back is not obnoxious at all (much better than my Moleskine planner) with absolutely no bleed-through, and the ball point pen is hardly visible through the paper at all.

**Edited to add: I have confirmation from the company that their paper is acid-free and FSC certified. Wonderful!!!

**Update: the only thing this planner didn't have that I wished it did was a back pocket. But I fixed that! I trimmed a Planner Pad Insta-Pocket to fit and stuck it inside the back cover.

 Shazam! Now I have a place to tuck papers!  My planner joy is now complete!

In my post on how I use my weekly and daily planners together I talked about why I wanted to move from my Franklin Covey binder into this day per page planner. This book gives me an equivalent amount of space each day as my Franklin Covey two pages per day inserts but in a much slimmer and lighter book than my Franklin Covey binder. It also has the advantages of permanently bound pages and having the entire year in one book.

Time Traveler planners come in weekly and daily formats with all these excellent features. You can see their selection at the Time Traveler website (www.timetravelerusa.com) and can purchase directly from them. I bought this planner at Amazon UK but I had to search 2013 Firenze because it didn't come up under Time Traveler. You can also buy Time Traveler planners at Amazon.com and at Calendars.com (which ships worldwide).

I highly recommend these planners! (Disclosure: I am not affiliated in any way, just a happy customer!)

Cassandra's Franklin Covey Monarch size weekly planner

Huge thanks to Cassandra for this guest post showing how she uses her Franklin Covey Monarch size week on two pages planner!


Hello,
My name is Cassandra and I live in the U.S.A with 4 teenagers, a husband, and Noah’s ark. This year I have combined my day planner, homeschool planner, and Flylady control journal into one. I have been struggling for the last 1 ½ years with seeing my week from 2PPD FC set up that I had been using for 18 years. We made a move and I only go to town on Wednesdays. Items were falling through the crack because I wasn’t getting the whole idea of six more days to be completely ready for. After four months I have finally found a solution to this time of my life. I moved to a Monarch (8 ½” x 11”) Franklin Covey weekly page. I had been using a Classic 2PPD (5.5’ x 8.5”) before, with a homeschool planner book and my Flylady Journal. I hate having to constantly go from one to the other and back again. Insane.  My solution:

A week on two pages, vertical columns and task lists at the bottom. (I love the vertical columns because I have a long drive to town and I forget to plan that into my time and end up shorting myself. Or over planning my Wednesdays, thinking I can get it all done.) The time is from 6 AM-8 PM with empty slots above and below so you can write weird times like my family operates. My husband can leave anytime between 2 AM-7 AM, my first child 4 or 5 AM and my second child works nights so he leaves at 9 PM. (somewhere there should be a disclaimer that says “Do Not Attempt This In Your Own Home”).

Now I write once for the whole week. The weekly pages are not back to back, this is where I fall in love with this planner. On the back of your M-W weekly is the Weekly Tasks sheet which has a ¼” column for you to mark it completed, forwarded, deleted, delegated, or in process. Then there is a ½” column to prioritize ABC and 123. (I know it was brought up what the symbol meant for delegating tasks was on here, you simply write the persons initial, circle it if they are working on it, and then a check mark over them if they have completed it. It gets a little messy looking, but I use it when I delegate to kids/hubby. Comes in very handy when I ask who was supposed to clean the toilet and everyone shrugs and says not me.)

Instead I draw a grid of 1/4” squares, labeling the days across the top.  I have my morning, afternoon and evening Flylady routines on the left side, my two younger kids’ school subjects on the top right and then my weekly items in the bottom right. School items get a checkmark when done or a lesson number if pertinent. Daily Routines and Weeklies just need a checkmark stating it was done this day/week.

This week I also wrote “Goals this week:” at the top, since this is the page I am on 99% of the time, hoping to keep 2-3 items right there where I will see them and hammer them out each week.

 

The notes page after the weekly page:  I simply use to record events/information that may be important to look back on. Quickly jot the date down and a snippet of information or journal entry. Quotes I put at the bottom so I can quickly scan back and read them anytime.

The first page of the planner states which design you have picked and then you have a place to list your personal information in case someone finds your book.

Followed by a page of yearly calendars.

Two page monthly calendars with wonderful laminated tabs that will last all year without getting tore up. I spaced these through the year.

Monthly pages have a note section which I use to remember something coming up that month that does not have a set date. I made a Girl Scout cookie order, putting the child’s name, the number/kind of cookies bought and a total. She does not know when they will be here, just that it will be March. The other item comes from a food mail order. You order two months in advance and I always forget what I ordered, how much, which month, etc. so I started noting that here as well.  There is no set date for it to arrive and now I can quickly see if I have already ordered that item or how much money I need to have on hand that month to pay her when it arrives.

The front of the monthly has the wonderful index. After the month is over I read through my entries and then list the date and a brief description of anything that may need to be quickly found again.

The back of the monthly has a Master Task list with two columns, personal and business. Since I am a stay-at-home mom that homeschools and volunteers I try to separate my personal things on the left and all other things on the right.

At the end there are one month per page calendars for 2014 and then a single page for 2015 with each month and 7 lines for each of them. Very handy and I already have info entered there as well.

One more thing—the shopping list. It is in there, how I make it is another topic. It keeps me on budget and it stays in the binder, otherwise I would lose it! My kids are all big enough now so I just prop my binder in the shopping cart seat and away I go.

No, I do not have a problem carrying this with me. I have a big purse, Mary Poppins bag to be exact, many a person has marveled at all the things I can keep pulling out of there.

It’s your life, your planner; make it work for you--not you working for it!

Cassandra

Thanks again Cassandra for showing us your amazing FC system!