Five Rules of Paper Planning
Use these five rules for planning to guide you as you explore managing your life on paper. If you have been using a paper planner for a while, use these rules to revitalize your planner habits.
Five Rules of Paper Planning
Rule One: Plan your own way.
This is your planner, no one else’s. It should serve you. It should be a place that you want to be. A place that gives you peace. If any recommendation from someone else doesn’t work for you: abandon it. If stickers and pasted in photos make you love your planner, embrace it. If they stress you out, ignore them. If these rules stress you out, make your own system. It’s your planner and you have to make it work for you.
Rule Two: Put in any and every task that swirls in your brain.
A lot of people think of planners as strictly a date book, a place to write down appointments. Certainly, that is one way to use a planner. However, your planner can serve as a collection of all the things you need to manage. Shift your view of what a planner can be. By looking at the whole week at one time, you can plan out tasks, social calendar, self-care, etc based on a complete picture of the week.
That can mean writing down anything that needs to be done, even if it feels dumb. Write down “eat lunch” or “text friend happy birthday. Write down things that you have already done, just so you can check them off.
Write down the things that keep popping up in your mind. The things you keep forgetting. Make them concrete and record them in your planner.
Beyond tasks, record things that are important to you: a friend’s baby-due-date, family birthdays, your nieces favorite food, your parent’s travel plans, happy mail delivery dates, etc. Capture the things that you feel like you should be able to remember, but they just don’t seem to stick. Write them down because they are important, and make other people feel loved.
Rule Three: Transfer tasks.
At the beginning of the week, look back at the previous week and copy any tasks that didn’t get done, and still need to be done. Don’t transfer blindly.
Sometimes you will get to the end of a week, and the thing you wrote down just isn’t important anymore. Cross it off, and let it go. Don’t be hard on yourself either if you didn’t get everything done. Every day is a new day. Every week is a new week. You are not a failure.
Rule Four: Limit your tasks per day.
It simply isn’t possible to do everything in one day. Allow the space in your planner to be a limiter. If you have filled up your tasks for that day, you are probably doing too much. Aim to record 1-7 tasks per day. And recognize that is ok, and healthy, to have some days with no tasks written at all.
Rule Five: Set up your future self well.
There is a gift in having a planner for the whole year. As you work through your planner, you may find tasks that occur only once or twice a year, such as: oil changes, kid’s well visits, or deep cleaning your oven. These are the kinds of tasks and appointments that can leave you wondering “When did I last do that?”
Use your planner to hold these long standing tasks and events that can easily fall to the wayside. You know what your future-self needs to remember, and what you always forget. Let your planner be your second brain.
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