What’s Your Ideal Planner or Bullet Journal Setup?

we talked about digital diary keeping and favorite paper plannersbut not for a while, let’s discuss: What does your ideal planner or diary look like? Do you prefer some plans to be on paper, in the cloud, or on a specific schedule?

{related: here’s our 2012 discussion ideal planner/calendar}

I’ve bought so many journals over the years (not to mention my attempts to follow habits and reward myself for streaks!), a few days ago when I actually surprised myself by asking for a bullet journal that I could take from place to place. me and pencil scribbling.

Then I started to think about what I would want in my bullet journal – what I had seen in other magazines and planners – and what I was adapting for me on my own. digital bullet journal.

For example: I really like the weekly plan I use in my digital diary, where I evaluate weekly meals, goals, to-dos, a few thought-study type questions (gratitude, what am I doing right, how can I do 1). % change for the better).

I’ve also collected tons of daily prompts from various diet, writing, and other programs I’ve done over the years – plus vision plan-type stuff for the year ahead and ways to assess the year behind me.

One thing that isn’t very useful in my life are hourly planners or even monthly planners – I greatly prefer to keep appointments or anything like that in the Google calendar where I can also set up automatic reminders. like easily sharing data with caregivers for my husband and kids.

In short, I came up with a very ambitious plan for FrankenPlan, a diary or planner to print. Lulu I use a lot of these for myself but leave enough pages open for freelance writing. (We’ll see if it really happens, huh..)

My Ideal Planner and Journal Setup

So far, my ideal planner’s directory looks like this – keep in mind that I tend to see both the front and back of a journal as primary real estate, so some important/favorite stuff might be in the end.

• Weekly Plan / Meal Plan / Evaluation / Regular thought work – I would also put some habit trackers here and others may go to the monthly section. I also keep notes on expenditures in the weekly section.
• Monthly Planner/Evaluation – Goals, tasks, memories, challenges, etc. Some progress/habit monitors would also come here.
• Future Diary – a space to record things that will happen in the future, whether recurring (pay estimated taxes) or specific (plan a nice birthday for Dad’s 75th birthday!).
• Corporette calendar – For years I have stored content ideas by month/time of year, but this is on my computer. It would be nice if it was in paper form. (We also keep a lot of story ideas in Slack…which saves them to Trello…and it all gets a little confusing.)
• Recipe Reviews is the place for my huge spreadsheet of possible recipes by theme, and scribbled reviews of things I need to use or cook soon. (I tend to save recipes on my various social media accounts to try—but sometimes I go over them and try to condense them all into one list.)
• Books – I like to save my favorites of the year as well as the books I’ve read or listened to.
• Shows and Movies – I also like to save shows and related thoughts on shows I watch and keep a constant list of movies and shows to watch.
• Lessons learned
• Journal (lots of blank pages for diary / thoughts / whatever)
• Notes on workouts – if I’m doing a recording from Les Mills or want to record what the number is and my opinion of it (usually something insightful like “too many pushups”).
• And (at the back) my annual workout tracker with more space for other specific target-related trackers

And you readers? What does your ideal planner or bullet journal setup look like? What do you prefer to write on paper instead of keeping it in the cloud or in a specific program? If you are using multiple programs (eg. EvernoteOneNote, Outlook, Google Keep/Calendar/Documents, daylio, Completed, Slack, Trelloetc), how do you parse what goes into which program?