In today’s video I am walking you through an activity I like to do to organize my habits and routines called My Ideal Day! I encourage you to download the free insert and create your ideal daily schedule to keep you on track with your goals for the year!
My planner aesthetic has certainly changed significantly over the past several years, as has the way I choose to decorate the planner itself. Where I was once drawn in by brighter colors and mixing bold patterns, adding flair to my planner with stickers, washi tape and other ephemera- now I prefer a cleaner, simpler and more elegant look. My color pallet has gone down to basic black and white with muted tones of nude and grey. I do love a pop of emerald green in the mix- used sparingly of course! But things have been refined quite a bit to create a vibe or aesthetic for my planner that aligns more with my personal style.
After all, I truly believe that although our planners are at their core, tools for our productivity, it’s important that they fit into our lives in a way that makes them inviting and exciting. I consider my planner an accessory of sorts- a living vision board of my aspirations brought to life in paper and ink, expressed in words and images. The way I feel about my goals must be reflected in the way I feel about my planner. I want to open it up each day- multiple times a day- to feel aligned with where my life is headed, excited about the things I get to do and the opportunities I’m creating for myself in my life. That’s why it’s so important for me that my planner has an intentional vibe (or vibration) in line with a specific aesthetic, because our planners can be great tools for manifestation if we let them.
So, today I want to share a few tips with you to help you create a unique vibe and aesthetic for your planner without needing to use stickers or washing tape to decorate. I know for many of us in the community- where we may have once been drawn to this ephemera, as we have progressed, it has become the content of our planners that has really taken center stage as opposed to the hobby crafting or decor. But that doesn’t mean our planners have to be bland. They can and should absolutely be beautiful and well organized as a reflection of the plans we make inside of them.
Without further ado, here are 5 ways to style your planner without stickers and washi tape.
Choose and stick to a color scheme.
The quickest way to create an intentional vibe for your planner is to define and stick to a color scheme by choosing a handful of colors that work together to tell the visual story of your planner. These colors you choose should then be used to help you decide different aspects of your planner like the color of the cover or binder, the paper and font colors used for inserts, your pen and highlight colors, and the stationery items you keep inside your planner. One comment I often receive about my planner (as well as other aspects of my life) is that “everything matches” or rather that everything coordinates. Matching is when everything is the same color/pattern, coordinating is when everything is within the same intentional scheme. The simplest way to get things to follow an aesthetic is to limit and stick to a color scheme and ensure that nothing deviates from that color scheme.
Layer textures and patterns in pockets.
Next, let’s cover the art of layering. As with other aspects of design like fashion and home decor, layering is another technique that can be used to create a deliberate aesthetic in your planner. For this technique, you will need to rely on the organization pockets of your planner to create a three-dimensional visual experience when you open the planner up. Now this can be done in the pockets of the cover or through the use of additional pocket inserts that can be added to the front of you planner to create visual depth. Using the pockets of your planner cover as a prime example, layout a few key pieces of inspiration mixed with functional stationery within your color scheme. Keep in mind that its good to vary items by size so that each item is visible, and that working with odd numbers is always more visually appealing. So that would mean if you are decorating a pocket, choose 1, 3, 5 etc items to put in the pocket as opposed to 2 or 4. As you can see in my example, my passport pocket has 5 items of varying hight organized so that each item is layered but visible. I’m also using a paper clip to ensure that certain items stay put and don’t move around in the pocket, but this clip also adds an additional element of depth as well.
Select a cover with the right vibe.
For this tip I am referencing both the planner cover itself as well as the front dashboard of your planners inserts. These two elements of your planner are very much the first thing you see when using the planner, so it’s important that thought and intention are put into their selection. When it comes to the actual cover of the planner, it’s important that the style, color, pattern, material and even the brand of the planner itself be in line with the vibe you are aligning with. You could want a simple black leather cover and assume any black leather cover will do, but all brands and all leathers are not the same. Make sure that the quality and feel of the planner is in line with your style. Then of course, when it comes to the inner cover, or dashboard of your planner, although this element will likely be some form of paper or plastic, choose something that sends a direct message through the imagery, pattern or style. That message, of course, should be the vibe you are setting for your planner and it’s aesthetic!
Add vellum overlays throughout your planner.
An element of planner decor I have long admired but only recently began to use myself is printed vellum overlays. In one sense, they are a wonderful way to add inspiration to your planner through printed words or imagery without having to decorate inserts with stickers and washi. But what I also love about vellum overlays is that they again add a sense of dimension to your planner because depending on what you have printed on them, you can usually see the next insert in your planner underneath it. If you are someone who likes to print and add pictures or quotes to your planner, consider using vellum paper next time as it really does stand out by adding an unexpected level of interest to your inserts as you are flipping through your pages!
Fill your planner with goals and dreams that truly light you up.
I’ve said it before and I will happily say it again- if the sole purpose of my planner is to keep track of mundane life tasks and appointments, I need a planner like i need a hole in the head! I keep a planner, not to manage my time but to manage my goals! A goal is a dream with a deadline, yes? And those goals aren’t going to manifest themselves! They take a fair bit of intention, planning and execution to come to fruition and that’s where your planner comes in. No matter which planner you are using and what your planner looks like, never loose sight of the fact that your planner is the physical manifestation of your future and life story being written in real time- and that’s a serious vibe that no amount of aesthetic can ever beat!
I hope these 5 tips have inspired you to create an intentional vibe for your planner this year! I would love to hear what you thought of this information and the aesthetic that you’ll be using in your planner so please do leave me a comment below!
Today I have something fun for you, a planner personality test to determine what your planner style says about you! Specifically, today I’m going to evaluate the four most common planner closure styles and what it reflects about your personality if you are use each. Now, I realize, most of us within the planner community have used different closure styles in the past. I for one have dabbled in planners with each of these closure methods, but I think there might be one or maybe two types of planner closures that we are drawn to above all others. Of course, if you enjoy this video make sure to give it a thumbs up, share the video with your planner besties and of course, leave me a message in the comments for the video to let me know your planner style and if the personality test was accurate for you!
First, let’s begin with the zip around planner style: If you are drawn to this style of planner you are likely a very cautious and even secretive person. You are likely not a very showy person, you’re much more reserved, you might be prone to anxiousness, and you might be something of a worst case scenario planner. Planners who use this style closure are likely to enjoy a small but close circle of friends and are not risk takers.
Next, let’s dissect the button closure planner style:If you are drawn to this style of planner you are likely a very buttoned up and professional type person on the outside. You are likely a networker at heart, with a busy schedule always making moves in your social and professional life. You like action and activity, you are drawn to people and likely have a varied network of friends and acquaintances. Although you might like to present yourself as a polish pro, however, you certainly have a wild or mischievous side you aren’t afraid to let slip out every once in a while.
Next, we have the string or elastic closure planner style: Planners drawn to this style are very flexible people who are also extremely creative. You are not afraid of a change of plans or to go with the flow. You have lots of big ideas and aren’t afraid to bring them to fruition, although, it must be said, you may have a tendency to start more projects than you finish. But you have a lot going on in your mind, sometimes is may be a little cluttered in there but you are the type of person who absolutely always finds some way to work things out and fit things in. You have a modest, but extremely tight knit circle of friends and family who consider you their #1 cheerleader and greatest supporter.
Finally, we come to book style planners or planners without a closure: If you are one of the planners drawn to this style you are likely very easy going and care free. You don’t like limits, boundaries or rules, in fact you are always trying to push the envelope when it comes to those things. You might have a rebellious spirit but always have your heart in the right place. Although you might normally be highly organized, you do sometimes have a tendency to bite off more than you can chew, but you always find a way to manage things without a meltdown. You may have a great circle of friends but often prefer to spend time alone in thought or self-care.
So, which of the four planner styles are you drawn to and do you agree or disagree with the personality typing? Let me know in a comment below!
Today I am continuing with my Productivity Myths series where I explain why some common productivity advice isn’t accurate and uncover the truth hidden beneath the myth so you can actually improve your productivity!
Productivity Myth #3: Hourly schedules keep your day on track!
It seems like pretty basic planning and productivity advice, doesn’t it? Even many planners come designed with hourly grids where you are encouraged to map out, hour-by-hour the tasks of your day. It reminds me of a quote “a place for everything and everything in it’s place” but twist that to “a time for everything and everything in time.” In a different world, where things always run smoothly and best laid plans come to fruition, an hourly schedule does seem like the perfect solution for planning your day. But, alas, over time I have come to recognize how this seemingly sound advice can wreak havoc when put into practice.
Now, I do want to provide a disclaimer to this information and say I recognize that in some cases, using an hourly schedule is necessary for the work that some of us do. Many businesses work on an hourly appointment schedule for very good reason, and I am not suggesting that this practice should end. I’ll expound on the situations where using an hourly schedule does work a little later on. What I am suggesting with this information, however, is that for those of us with more control over how we spend our time, there are significant reasons why hourly schedules are problematic to overall productivity.
First, let me explain the productivity science behind why using an hourly schedule may seem to work. There is an axiom in productivity known as Parkinson’s Law. It states that “work expands to fill the time allotted for its’ completion.” In common language this means that no matter how much time you give yourself to work on a task, it will take you that long to complete it. Now, in the past, I often took this axiom to also mean that work contracts to fill the time allotted for its’ completion. Meaning that if you give yourself less time to complete an objective, you will also accomplish it in that time as well. However, I have come to realize that this is not true for objectives across the board. Yes, if I give myself 15 minutes to clean my kitchen I can get a decent job done by speeding up my actions that I might usually do at a more relaxed pace in 30 minutes. Or, I might do a decent job but skip over some actions or lessen the quality of the work I am doing to some extent.
Now, cleaning my kitchen is one situation where my adaptation of Parkinson’s Law works well enough, but there are plenty of other examples where it fails. For example, if I am traveling by car to visit a family member in another state, this may be a trip that takes me 90 minutes on average. Now, if I gave myself a time frame of 120 minutes, by Parkinson’s Law, it may very well take me 120 minutes because I might stop at a rest area or for a snack or gas on my way to my destination. However, I cannot expect to be at my destination in 30 minutes or even 60 minutes because the laws of physics and the state of New Jersey say I cannot legally travel by car and reach my destination in such a short period of time. In some respects I believe that the concept of Parkinson’s Law shows how making a realistic schedule and sticking to it can work for completing objectives, however, it doesn’t really work when trying to limit time spent on tasks. In addition, it pretty much ignores some of the most common issues that interfere with productivity when using the model of an hourly schedule to manage your objectives.
So, next I want to lay out a few of the most common issues that arise when using an hourly schedule. If you have ever tried and failed to stick to one, you might recognize a few of these yourself from personal experience.
The most common issue I see with using an hourly schedule for your day is that many people have a difficult time carving out the proper amount of time to alot to an activity. If you have ever tried an hourly schedule and assigned tasks to a specific time slot, you likely faced the scenario where your tasks were taking longer than originally expected and although you were working diligently on your tasks, you started falling behind. Unfortunately, many people are just very bad guessers when it comes to assuming how much time something will take. It’s a default for many of us to assume something will get done quicker than is realistically possible. Even (and sometimes even especially) when we know we have completed a task before in the past. How often have you said to yourself “oh, I’ll do this now, it will only take 15 minutes,” but by the time you wrap up 40 minutes has elapsed? When it comes to time, hindsight is not 20/20 and unless you have specifically tracked and measured your time for various activities in the past, more often than not, you remember it taking less time than it really did.
The second most common issue people face when using an hourly schedule is that unexpected issues or distractions often pop up during the day and divert our attention away from our schedules, again throwing us off track. I think the concept of distractions keeping us from our work is something we are all familiar with and understand how that negatively impacts productivity, so let’s focus on unexpected issues. Unexpected issues can take the form of changes to our planned tasks, technical or communication issues that halt the flow of our work, or people/processes we need to work with or through to complete our work. These aspects are the most unpredictable part of creating a schedule because no matter how diligently we work towards our objectives, in many scenarios other factors can keep us from being productive and staying on track.
The third and final common issue people face when using an hourly schedule is that they ignore or fail to account for their personal energy cycles. People are not robots. Even if we know the precise amount of time our tasks will take and can ensure we are in a distraction and problem-free environment, it is still hard for us to stick to a schedule because working back to back on tasks is mentally exhausting and mental energy is a difficult factor to plan for. Each of us has an amount of energy we begin the day with and that energy cycles in highs and lows that most of us are not attuned to. Sometimes, work just drains us and this results in a slowing of our rate of productivity that again throws us off schedule. Yes, sometimes coffee can help us power through it, but that affect is usually only temporary.
Next, I’d like to explain one lesser recognized issue when it comes to using hourly schedules, but one that I am extremely mindful of, and that is the fact that hourly schedules prevent us from going with the flow of least resistance in our work. The way I look at the previous three common issues to using an hourly schedule is that they each represent a different form of common resistance that throws us off our well laid plans. This is an indication to me that the plans, however, were not well laid. Yet, people will continue to push through, clinging to their schedule, trying very hard to stick to it and then feeling overwhelmed and dissatisfied when they fail to achieve the plan. For me, when I approach my work, I see my objectives as outcomes I would like to manifest and so I prefer to go with the flow and not hold too tightly onto my own expectations or plans for how something should go in order to be completed. Although in many cases with our tasks, our reasonable expectations will be fulfilled, that’s not because things can only work out one way. Objectives can be met and outcomes can come to fruition in a myriad of ways, so when we try to stick to our plan as though its the only way forward, we usually prevent ourselves from meeting our objectives in the easiest way.
This is where I will insert my favorite productivity example of playing a game of chess to illustrate the point for you. In chess the objective is to capture your opponents King piece. Games of chess can last hours or even days between two players matched in skill making countless moves across the board, but a chess master can also win the game against a lesser skilled player within a matter of just a handful of moves. Think of your daily schedule or plans as those games of chess. Most of us start our day with a strategy that involves many moves and through our days sticking to this plan we can hit roadblocks that cause us to have to make even more moves to get to our desired outcome. But, in reality, there is a path you can take where you only have to make a few key moves to reach your objectives. It’s the Pareto Principle, 80% of our results come from 20% of our actions. So my suggestion to you is that using an hourly schedule is like playing a long game a chess, when you might actually be able to use a different strategy with far less effort to reach the same ends.
Now, I don’t want this article to be all negative, because as I stated earlier, there are situations where using an hourly schedule works, and I think we can learn from these situations how to best use an hour schedule to manage our tasks and objectives productively.
I think the best example of when an hourly schedule works is with an appointment based time management model. So visiting the doctor, getting a service done or having a call or meeting. When your work requires you to achieve a certain number of daily objectives, like sales calls or patient visits, mapping out an hourly schedule and working with clients within that window is a great way to put that reverse principle of Parkinson’s Law in place. The key here is that the limit or expectation is agreed upon by all parties and that a regular routine of service is fulfilled. I guess we can all have a laugh about expectations at the doctors office as in some instances our appointment window isn’t always honored, but for other professional services or customer calls the system works because their is an expected process to follow that from experience has very little deviation. So essentially, when your task or objective follows a script or prescribed system or process, it’s okay to use an hourly schedule for time management as long as other factors like interruptions can be minimized or prevented.
So I hope you can see now why I do not use hourly schedules on a daily basis for myself and I don’t normally recommend them to others. Moving forward I hope you will use this information to help you more adequately evaluate factors that hold back your productivity and keep you from executing on your objectives. Think about paying closer attention to or even tracking the time it takes you to complete tasks so you clearly understand the time expectations of your work. Notice the types of issues that pop up when you work on different objectives to help you better anticipate drains on your time the next time you complete those tasks. Most of all, I hope you will start to notice the patterns in your own mental energy while you work to understand how your energy cycles throughout the day. Each of these areas will help you understand yourself and how to maximize your productivity in the future, bringing you close to becoming the master of your productivity game.
I hope this information has been insightful to you and helps you to master your productivity game. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the topic and how you are using this information to benefit your life! So, please do leave me a comment below!
I was recently presented with an opportunity to purchase something of a Unicorn binder for myself and I took it! Here is a walk-thru of my updated 2020 Planner Setup now featuring my Chanel Camellia Desk Agenda. For those of you familiar with luxury goods or the luxury planner world, this is a similar concept to the Louis Vuitton Desk Agenda and is something of a notebook or planner cover that can be used as a planner organizer as well. My Chanel Agenda is set up using my 2020 Master Planner Inserts bound with disks and some fun stationery accessories. I hope you enjoy!
ALSO, for those of you interested in this planner, I wanted to point out a correction to something I said in the video. I stated that this planner was calfskin, however, it is goatskin. This is a little different than calfskin or lambskin. It’s soft like lambskin, with a bit more grain, however, it’s more durable than calfskin because it’s more water resistant. Hope that clarifies it for you- I know in the video it’s hard to really see the leather so I wanted to make sure you knew the actual material!
I know there are not many setup videos for Chanel Planners & Agenda’s on YouTube and I couldn’t find very much information myself on the elusive creatures- but hopefully my video gives you some insight on them. The agenda I purchased is from the Camellia line and dates to 2010, but she is in immaculate condition in my opinion.
This will likely not be the last video I make on the subject of this planner- I’ve already started adding new things to the planner that after I filmed today’s upload so I will share those in future updates. If you have any questions about searching for rare or luxury planners like the Chanel desk agenda’s, let me know and if I get enough Q’s I’ll make a video or blog post to answer your questions.
In the meantime, make sure you are subscribed to my Youtube channel because I’ve got some great new content I’m working on as well as some new freebie downloads to help you boost productivity in your planner!
Let me know what you think about the planner and what content you’d like to see from me in 2020 by leaving me a comment down below!
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If you’re like me and love the idea of starting the New Year off with all your goals laid out and properly broken down into manageable and simple to execute plans, I know you will not want to miss out on the New Year’s Goal Setting and Planning Workshop!
Join me as I walk through my goal setting process in the workshop replay and get my direct feedback via email support to ensure you are setting the most actionable and well planned goals possible for a successful 2020!
In this activity rich and thought provoking 3-hour workshop, I’ll show you how to:
✔︎ Balance both your personal and professional objectives for the year.
✔︎ Set the right goals by tying each objective to a concrete priority to keep you motivated and inspired to bring your goals to fruition.
✔︎ Clearly evaluate where you are right now in your life and what you were (or were not) able to achieve in 2019 and why.
✔︎ Manage the timing of your objectives across the year to ensure you have time to complete everything without getting overwhelmed!
This workshop contains the exact steps I take each and every year to help me achieve my personal and business goals.
I know you won’t want to miss this limited replay offer and have the opportunity to have all your important goal setting questions answered!
In addition to the workshop replay, you will also get a set of printable PDF Goal Setting Worksheets, and email support directly from me through January 31st, 2020!
I truly want to set you up for success in 2020 and I know this workshop plus my support will ensure your goal setting success!
In today’s video I am sharing my 2020 Goals & Intentions with you! I’m discussing my Word of the Year, Annual Anthem, Goals & the Intentions I have set for my channel this year. I would love to hear what word, anthem, goals and intentions you have set, so please do share yours in the comments!
Also, you might notice throughout this video (because I certainly did) that I keep looking up and to the right LOL! I am NOT looking at anything in particular- it’s natural as people are speaking and trying to remember points that they look up and to their left (visually it looks like it’s your right hand side) but I think it looks so extreme at some points because the camera is actually set from a lower angle in this video. I just wanted to mention it because I actually thought about pointing this out during editing but I left it alone. So, in case you were wondering what I am looking at, nothing! LOL
