For somebody who appears from the outside to be totally organised, and also someone who has created all sorts of planners, it is a guilty truth that I don’t keep a daily planner or calendar for that matter.

This is because –

1. I have always had a fantastic planning memory (for date triggers and things) and figure at my now tender older age I should continue to prompt and use it to retain some brain health. I don’t do brain puzzles, I do brain planning.
2. Any big plans I have created (which can take hours of designing spreadsheets or onenote notebooks, or planners or calendar entries) and have shared with family members have, after only a week or less, gone unused (by my family, damnit). Sharing on websites is not as easy as it should be, despite cloud storage promises.

I decided it’s the writing down and planning stage that does me good, not the actual looking back and checking off things in hindsight. Once I’ve spent time actually planning what happens when, and then next – well, then it’s ingrained in memory. So far so good.

It’s taken me many years of experimentation, but with maturity comes the allowance that the planning system (or lack of system) I use which works for me, is simply that – it works for me, and makes me comfortable.

This is why I work with content-to-time sensitive planning as I need it. At the moment this means I am designing my own “Moving House” lists by personalising what others may have prepared earlier. For my fiction writing project, my planning is much less organised – I tend to write from start to stop rather than ducking into scenes, but planning is more towards plot throughlines etc. And I use specific writing apps for those tasks.

My planners are normally digital and via apps like Evernote (I’ve been an Evernote customer since the app began), OneNote (enjoy the ability to structure into folders) and sometimes via Trello boards. Although I have a google calendar which prompts me with upcoming events every morning, I don’t have it on hand often enough to make it beneficial.

I’ve used many and almost all of the popular planning, calendar and task apps out there, but always end up not using them long-term, at least on a daily basis. Each new year I do tend to go back and use one or more of these, to kick me into planning for larger projects and tasks I may want to approach through the year, but as this entry is about my daily planner, I have to admit that I don’t actually keep one.

Instead, important dates are written onto an old-school physical calendar which hangs in the kitchen. This used to be more important when my daughter was at home and for the many school events, but nowadays only holds upcoming dental or hairdressing appointments on it.

Want to see what I came up with for a Moving House planner? Stay tuned, and coming soon.