Productivity

2017 in Planners – how many did I use?

Happy New Year! I’m back from my festive blogging break to talk through last year’s planners!

Despite being fairly stable in my every day planning, it seems this year was the year I played around with the planners for everything else in my life. If you want to take a look at what I started 2017 with planner-wise you can see my set up post here.

I figured the easiest way to talk through my 2017 in planners was through a good old planner stack. This is the collection of planners I’ve used throughout the year for longer a month. Except my Pocket Finsbury. Which I forgot about at the time of taking this shot. I also didn’t really use it as a planner in 2017 per se, but more on that later.

From top to bottom:
Patent Fuchsia Filofax Original Personal
Burnt Orange Filofax Original Personal
Patent Nude Filofax Original Personal 
Midori Travelers Notebook Blue (Limited Edition)
Mini Happy Planner
Leuchtturm Official Bullet Journal in a Lyra & Co cover
Classic Happy Planner

The Originals

I’m pleased to say that throughout the year, how I used my Patent Nude and Burnt Orange didn’t actually change. The Burnt Orange contains all my life planning – monthly and weekly planning. The Patent Nude houses everything else – addresses, finance tracking and present planning. 

The Patent Fuchsia however was a later addition. I had been using a large Kikki K planner for business and blog planning but felt it wasn’t really working for me. I decided to downsize and move into the Fuchsia that could fit nicely on my desk with my other personals.

The Fuchsia is working so much better for me now and I really use it as a planning hub for my little business! It’s not really evolved too much from my initial set up earlier this year so if you want to take a look, the post is here.

SPECIAL MENTION: Goes to my A5 Original which I’m still using as a home planner.

Travelers Notebooks/Doris

I’m popping these together as they are very similar in their design. The Midori has definitely evolved the most over the year. I really want to love this planner but have yet to find a set up I like. This is primarily used a holiday planner and all my research is contained in here. Then, when I’m away I use it as a reference of what to do and for daily journaling. Halfway through the year I wanted to use this as more of a daily planner as I realised my week on two pages in my Filofax just wasn’t giving me enough space. I therefore moved my daily blog and shop planning into this. 

While I didn’t use all the space in here, it was nice to have seemingly endless space for many many lists. Up until this point I had lists of photos to take and stickers to print everywhere. It was far too disorganised for my liking. This was a much better set up. However, I didn’t like suddenly having two planners to refer to daily and ultimately at least one planner got neglected each week.

The Leuchtturm has been my trusty notebook all year long. It contains collections such as my reading list and skincare routine. It’s also used for research that I’m doing (for example for a blog post). Sometimes the highlights or detail will then get transferred to a planner (blog post ideas in my blog post planning pages for example). 

Happy Planners

I came full circle with these last year. 

The year started in the Mini Happy Planner. I used it as a health and fitness planner. For about two minutes. Unfortunately I didn’t achieve my fitness goals last year! After that it went to work where I quickly ditched it due to it being too small. I bullet journal at work now in a Moleskin and it’s perfect.

In Autumn on a whim I picked up a Big Happy Planner that was on sale. I planned in it for a couple of weeks while I was developing kits for it and fell in love. This was perfect for all my planning – personal, blog and shop! Even though it lived on my desk it was slightly too cumbersome so I picked up a cheap Classic from Zuilly. I spent the last month of 2017 doing all of my daily planning exclusively in the Classic. 

This has a perfect amount of space and I can cover up parts of quieter days with full boxes if I need to. This size is also a lot more flexible as Erin Condren sized kits will generally fit on the pages. I’ve also been able to get into decorating this in a way I never could in my Erin Condren. I think it’s largely down to the fact that I can remove the pages. It’s much harder to decorate with a coil in the way!

And finally…

My purse/purse extension.Last year this went everywhere with my purse. It houses cheques, loyalty cards and coupons. While it had pages in it, aside from the odd shopping list it didn’t really get used. I tried using it as a bit of an expense tracker but it felt unnecessary with a budget planning section of my Original that already worked for me.

If you read my everyday carry planner post from back in December though, you’ll know I’m wanting to change up this planner and use it as more of an actual planning tool. Watch out for my 2018 planner set up post for how I’m going to achieve that.

2017 in planners

I actually thought I wasn’t one of those people who bought all the planners. This post tells me I am! Ten planners in total I’ve had some sort of dealings with this year. TEN! 2018 can only be a lower number, right??

I’d love to know what planners you used in 2017 – please let me know in the comments below!

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