As promised, today's post is about how to stay organised in your planner. I thought I'd whip out my much-neglected Lilly Pulitzer Agenda & set up a few fake pages. I know, I know, faking pages is cheating, but I didn't have any uni things going on at the moment & I thought that planners would be most effective to help with school work and whatnot, so you understand, right? :-)
First off, these are my planner essentials. Washi tape, stickers, post-it notes, coloured markers & highlighters. A lot of planners have pockets for you to keep your bits & bobs so stickers fit nicely in there, as well as notes from school or important receipts & papers from work. The Marvy Uchida Le Pens are nice & thin, fitting nicely into my pencil case, as well as the Stabilo highlighters. I'm the kind of person who LOVES to use colour for anything & everything. In my opinion, they're great for colour-coding your subjects or allocating various things to different colours. The Pilot Hi-Tec-C Coleto pens are also great for those with limited pencil case space :-)
Monthly calendars often have space on the side for To Do lists. Sometimes I like to put my colour-coding system there to remind me which colours are for what. And this way, you can change them up each month if things happen to change (different subjects, extra curricular activities, etc). Washi tape is also great for highlighting/blocking out holidays or special dates.
While I'm doing my homework, if there are questions I want to ask teachers about, I write them all on a post-it note & stick them in my planner to ask at school. Post-it's are great because you can just stick them anywhere & throw them away once you're done with them (or keep them to make your pages pretty & colourful :D)
If you're not a colourful pen user, you can use highlighters to add a little bit of colour while helping you still colour code. I did this before & liked it quite a bit. It kept things simple yet colourful & organised without being too over-the-top. And some highlighters could bleed through the page or be too neon-y so sometimes I like to go back to the good old coloured pencils.
As you can see here, I assigned my subjects different colours so that anything I had to do for that particular class can be written in that colour throughout my pages. ☑︎ Check boxes are also a great way for you to keep track of what you need to do. And let's face it, that feeling you get when you tick things off is oh-so-satisfying. I tend to use check boxes for things I need to do & stars or bullet points for reminders or meetings, etc.
And your planner doesn't have to be strictly for work or school. I like to almost use it as a journal in some way, recounting things I did that day. For example, date night got a special little sticky note :D And I like to go all out for birthdays & holidays as well.
Having a planner can be really fun. I remember getting my first Filofax and being so excited to use it whenever I could. And that actually distracted me from my studies quite a bit, having the opposite effect a planner should have. Not to mention, I spent my days on Instagram & Pinterest, stalking amazing photos of planners and getting inspiration. So I think there needs to be a balance. Balance is so important in everyday life, and I guess once you get over the initial hype, you really do start to use it effectively & get the most out of it.
I hope this somewhat helped you to get an idea of how you might want to set up your planner & stay organised. I'd love to hear your thoughts & tips on how to organise your planner so please leave them down below.
Love Always,
Anna Banana ♡
