Here's my secret... I LOVE planners. ALL of the different planners. I love organizing information, and I love the process of writing and reflecting as a means for getting more clear. So let's talk about how to use your planner, and WHY things sometimes go so sideways even with a planner.
Planners should not feel like the gatekeepers of 'to-do list' hell. If your planner feels like a to-do list that leaves you exhausted or disempowered at the end of the day, you're using it wrong. Planners aren't there for us to barf out all of our "shoulds." They are actually a fantastic tool for seeing how we're managing life, so that we can make different decisions.
At a glance, I can see visually what my month looks like it wants to be. I've learned over time how to honor the cycle of days and weeks so that I don't try to cram everything in as if there's no tomorrow.
Planners remind us that there IS a tomorrow. As long as we're filling today with what is truly important, there will always be more time for other important experiences, until we die.
Whether you're trying to figure out how to organize your coming year in life or for business, here's your process for choosing a planner:
1.) Reflect - Begin with a clear assessment of where you’ve been. As you reflect on what kind of life you lead, how busy it tends to be, and what you've done in the past year, look at how much planning you do. Are you someone who takes spontaneous action? Do you tend to have checklists, or ways that you revisit information multiple times? Do you love habits and rituals?
2.) Identify- Decide how you want to feel in the coming year. Planners can help you with structure, but the right planner will also remind you of how you want to feel in your journey. If you want to feel structured, with your sense of personal power coming from tradition and experience, note that. Or maybe you'd prefer to feel light and free, with lots of space to play. How you want to feel will help dictate what you create this year.
3.) Dream- Put some time aside to meditate on where you’re going. Doing this helps you recognize where you may need to take special time planner. Do you have large house projects? A personal dream you'd like to manifest?
I love to use youtube for this, finding a nice meditation to help envision my year. Once you can see it in your mind's eye, and feel it in your heart, you're ready to create it.
4.) Plan- There are many different types of planners out there and I'll discuss some of my favorites below. However, once you have an idea of what you'll be focusing on for the year, choose a planner to match. Look online or go to your favorite stores to see what the planners feel like, and how they're set up.
What's most important is that you love your new planner. If you don't love it, why would you want it to be a part of your daily life? ❤️
If you buy a planner and get a few weeks into it, and it's not helping you track what is important, give yourself permission to try a new format and start again.
SELF REVIEWING WITH YOUR PAST PLANNER
Every time I get a new planner, I look through my old planner to get a sense of what worked, and didn't work. I ask myself:
Did I like this planner?
Where was I exhausted during my year?
Are there certain months where I tend to be more motivated or high in energy?
Are there patterns I recognize, that I'd like to change?
Where could I have left more time for my goals?"
I look at all of the facts. I look at what events and activities were filling up my calendar. I look at what types of activities, or what sequences, tended to make me feel depleted. I look at what activities filled me up, and also dates and times I felt off-track. If there are activities I loved, I decide whether I'd like to repeat them again in the new year.
Because this is a regular process for me, I've learned to write in when events have been changed or cancelled, even if it's after the fact. That helps me to see what actually happened, when looking back through my planner. I've also learned to make notes on my spiritual well-being, because I find it helpful to the assessment process.
If you're planning for a new year, and you didn't have a planner or journal, that's okay. You can go through your phone or emails to help trigger a memory of all that happened in the last year. Even better, look up an annual retrospective online. Sometimes public events help trigger more personal memories. Just pull out a piece of paper and see how much you can remember of your year, month by month.
You'll want all of this awareness in order to decide what comes next.
PLANNERS DON'T WORK WITHOUT FEELINGS
Here's a great secret of metaphysics. How you feel makes a big difference. Rather than focusing your planner on everything you need to DO, killing yourself each day to fit life in, focus instead on how you want to feel. Begin with a simple meditation.
You can do the meditations taught in my online Reiki 1 Training to help get super clear. Otherwise sit quietly, maybe even with music, and take a journey into your ideal life. Don't worry about material goods. Stay focused on who it feels important for you to be connected with (aka your family or your peeps). Do you want your days to feel easy and flowing, or intense and ambitiously driven?
When you set these energetic and emotional intentions, your brain begins to carry them out in reality. This is taught in metaphysics through the High Priestess Tarot Card Key 2, which says, "As within, so without!" What we create in our inner environment flows out into the external world. I call this the horizontal axis of co-creation, and teach about it in Reiki.
Your brain resets its defaults around living, so that anything important to your intentions is easier to notice. The reticular activating system that guides what you see, literally allows you to see the opportunities that will help you.
This may sound far-fetched, but you experience this everyday. Your brain has been trained to notice stop signs when driving. Police officers' brains have been trained to recognize a person who may be a threat within an instant, through this reticular activating system.
Scientists even did an experiment years ago where they watched participants read, and they found that the texts could preclude letters and even whole words, without impeding the understanding or context. This was because the brain supplied the 'right' answers, even to the point that participants didn't always notice that words were even missing. Their brains had a narrative and they ran with it.
THE POWER OF IMAGINING YOUR LIFE
So you want to be very clear about your emotional narrative before you pick up a new planner. THEN you can decide what experiences in life all calling to you based on that, and choose the right planner for that experience. I talk more about this in a video on my youtube channel. But essentially this is the fun part, before you begin planning, in which you ask yourself, "Do I want to travel? Do I want to focus on work? Is this year about love? What experiences do I want to have?"
We can get so used to doing things for others that we lose track of what we deeply desire. If that's you, then fear not, there's help! Leonie Dawson produces a pair of planners every year called the Goal Getter workbooks.
These are colorful workbooks meant to appear to your creative inner being, and each page is a worksheet to help you get clear about what you desire. Although they can be used as a vibe-y planner for the year, they're meant to be filled out spontaneously over time. The most helpful aspect of this is allowing yourself time to actually dream, not just do.
SOME OF MY FAVORITE PLANNERS
I love the We'moon weekly planner for tracking my moon time (aka menstrual cycle), and helping me to stay connected to the cycles and poetry of the earth. It's a planner that stays open near my altar most days, allowing me to see when important astrological turning points are coming. I tend to use it more like a journal, recording significant family and personal events. This in turn helps me plan my business around my energy patterns, keeping the sacredness of my life intact.
I also love the Happy Planner series of planners. These are fun planners with stickers, multiple layouts, and add-ins for special goals and topics. I love how crafty it feels, but it's also structured enough to hold my entire life, including business.
In the past I have also used Franklin Covey planners, and I recommend them if you need a detailed planning system and you are still learning to manage your life.
I also work with the Llewelyn Astrological Wall Calendar. I love having this up in my bedroom where I can see it each day. It feeds the part of me that loves fantasy art. Rather than using it to record things to do--because that's why I have the happy planner!-- I write my accomplishments in it, allowing me to celebrate at-a-glance all of my victories over the past month.
Target also carries the Create & Cultivate line of planners and some beautiful planners by Sugar Paper and I love those as well. I've used them in past years, and like the Happy planner, find that they have a variety of styles and fashionable looks that make planning fun.
The important thing is to find the planner that works for you. If you're planning on traveling and working minimally for 6 months, you may prefer a bullet journal that allows tons of space for your creative notes and experiences. Or you may even want a slender, pocket-book sized planner to keep important destination points.
If however you have a busy life full of details and social activities, maybe you need the Franklin Covey planner, so you have all of the details of your life on hand no matter where you are. Be creative, and trust your heart.
FILLING YOUR PLANNER SUCCESSFULLY
I personally believe that planners should inspire us, not enslave us, so I try to keep space in my planner wherever possible. To me, that represents space for new opportunities. That said, when I start to set up a new planner, I tend to go through the entire calendar by theme, blocking out time:
BIRTHDAYS - First I write in all of my important family or friend birthdays. I've also learned to block out an afternoon for gift shopping. I make sure to leave extra time for planning my kid's birthday, and any other specific birthdays I will be celebrating with more than a card. I like to do this ahead of time because once the year begins, I'll fill up that space unless it's already marked out.
SCHOOL DATES - I go onto my kid's school website and block out all of his days off. Before I had kids, I did this with my college dates, and then my work dates.
HOLIDAYS - Block out all holidays by writing in your traditions. If you have special days that aren't national holidays, write those in as well. For example, I love to follow the earth-based wheel of the year, so I put those special days in. I also tend to do something special for Earth Day, and I have a few made-up holidays that we celebrate.
IMPORTANT WORK EVENTS - If you're working on projects with major deadlines, put them into your planner right away so you can properly plan milestones towards reaching your goals. If you're an entrepreneur it's even more important to block out when you are working. Additionally, if you're in a company that offers annual raises, workshops, or other important social events, write those into your planner. Include a flight window if you will be traveling out of town, because this might necessitate important preparation.
VACATION DAYS - I will honestly forget about vacation unless I plan it way in advance. Write your vacation windows into your planner, even if you don't yet know what you'll be doing.
MAINTENANCE - People often think of planners as a space to write in what they'll e doing with other people, but a planner is also meant to keep you on track with yourself. I like to add in small blocks of time for spring cleaning, winter reflections, household maintenance, and special days just for me to do absolutely nothing. For some people it's an easy given, but I will fill time unless I block it out.
I also like to write motivational quotes into some of the pages, in months or windows of time where I know it will help uplift me. It's a treat to find these surprises as the year unfolds.
Your planner is meat to guide you in living your best life, so think of what kinds of reminders are most helpful and nourishing to you; those are the things you want to put into your planner right away.
3 REASONS PLANNERS SOMETIMES FAIL
Having a planner doesn't mean your life will be orderly at all times. In fact, the joy of planning for me is watching how things transform and evolve away from my initial imagination. However, you want that transforming to be good!
Here are 3 reasons why your planner may not be working for you:
1. Ignoring your true self. For your planner to work, you've got to create a life plan you actually want to follow. If your planner is filled with things you should do but don't want to do, then your work is to figure out how to delegate or eliminate as many of those tasks as possible, so that your planner reads like a menu of your favorite experiences.
2. Ignoring your time boundaries. There are only a certain number of hours in the day, and you need some of those hours to be for you, for what is truly important to you, and for the cultivation of your spiritual well being. HOW you cultivate that well-being is ultimately up to you, but you'll need time to write in your planner, check in with how you feel, think, and BE.
I've often seen that clients' well being go by the wayside when they are allowing beloved family members to dictate all of their time. Yes, the needs of our children and loved ones are very important, but we are important too. When we give ourselves that respect by guarding our private time, then our loved ones learn to hold that respect for themselves as well. Tension reduces. Peace is restored.
So if your life is feeling like a runaway train, pull the break and demand (yes, demand) time and space alone to look at what's happening, so you can reset and redirect.
3. Inconsistency. Planners work when you use them everyday. If you forget about them for weeks on end, they lose their mojo, and you lose track of where you were in your process. Treat a planner like a magical tool, and it will help you get where you want to be.
Begin that process with the consistency of looking at your planner every morning. Make notes if things change. Release judgement, and enjoy imagining all that your life can be!
*This article was first written in 2021, and is updated almost every year.
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DAILEY LITTLE is a healing practitioner, transformational life coach, ordained Priestess, and teacher who founded Healing Heart Reiki to help others navigate life with joy. She teaches classes in healing and mindset from a magical peaceful corner of the world in Northern California. For more info see: www.SantaRosaReiki.com
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