Going Classic

New Year, new planner. Who am I kidding? I usually change planners half way through the year. Typically I get undated planners or planners that allow for a July/August start. Usually I set up my calendar for August to June since my daughter's school usually starts in August. I decided to go crazy in 2017 and actually start my planner with a January date!

In the past I have used Filofax, Erin Condren Life Planner, Planner Pad and Passion Planner. Recently I was using the compact size of the Passion Planner. For 2017 I decided to go with the classic size (8x11) Passion Planner.

This is my compact size Passion Planner I used for most of 2016. It fit perfectly in almost all of my bags.

This is the undated classic size Passion Planner.

I used number stickers from etsy shop for the daily dates and washi tape for the "Week of."

For the monthly pages, I used stickers from etsy shop to label each month and hand wrote in the dates.

For my my planner has to be useful. I love stickers, highlighters and markers like the next planner geek, but I need to write down my appointments and my daily to dos. If i don't do that, then nothing gets done. So my decorating is minimal, but helpful. I do have a color coding system of sorts - blue for daughter, orange for me and yellow for hubby. Now those colors are for highlighters only. I use different color washi tape for all sorts of things :)

I hand write in my appointments. I write in events days, weeks, months in advance. I have to. I am extremely involved in our church and we have extended family we spend lots of time with and of course our daughter's schedule, I need to have everything written down so I know when we have free time. I used to update my planner once a week, now I look at it every day and will update it as needed.

So far I am liking the larger size of the planner. I think I will be able to write down more of my daily to do tasks in the day as well as in the blocks at the bottom of the page. I am a homemaker and volunteer so there are tasks to manage from multiple sources. I am sure there will be days when I will washi tape the times because they won't be necessary that day and write out in list form what needs to be done.

I belong to a few planner groups on facebook and there are more and more people who feel overwhelmed and intimidated by ornately decorated planner pages. For some people planners are more like journals and scrapbooks and the decorating is their art form. And then people like me need the planner to get stuff done and any decorating is just to add some color to it. Don't feel like you need to invest in a ton of stickers, markers, pens or highlighters.

I'll write more on that in the next post.

So, I'm going classic in 2017. How about you? What planner or calendar system do you use? Paper? Digital? I would love to hear and see what you use.