How to Use a Planner for Life

 

New planners, to me, are like a bowl of ice cream with a cherry on top.  I love using planners to organize my life and I want to help you to know how to use a planner for life organization too.

Sometimes we go through life and we just don’t take the time to prepare ourselves.  Life is always in motion and it goes even faster once children come into the picture.  Then the question becomes how do stay at home moms organize their time? I mean, if you need time to organize your time, and you don’t have that, aren’t you stuck?

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The Importance of Time Management for Moms

If you find yourself saying there aren’t enough hours in the day, then you need to revise how you are using your time.  I know very well that the days can go by so fast that you don’t take photos of your kids or activities, you don’t have time with your friends and you forgot your identity because you don’t take time for yourself.  

Mom life is a fluster of activity and frenzy.  We get caught up in just surviving and time management goes out the window.  But don’t let it go for long.

 

Time is a gift that the Lord has given us, so we can feel the motion of life and understand growth and change.  

 

However, time is limited for us all.  Once it’s gone, it’s gone. So we need to really evaluate what we are doing with our time, each day, even each hour, the reason why we think we don’t have enough time to organize future time.  And no one wants to look up years later, not having accomplished anything within that passage of time.  

 

But you can’t accomplish anything without creating goals.

And you can’t accomplish your goals without a plan.

 

What Are Planners Used For?

You may be thinking a planner is just a glorified calendar that you carry around with you.  And frankly, if you are thinking that you probably won’t use a planner. Or if you have, you probably have dropped off.  That’s what I did for a long time. And I love planners! #planneraddict

Using a planner to stay organized means more than jotting down dates to remember.  Although that is a part of it.

Planners are used for several things:

• Grocery List
• School Projects
• Goals List
• Memorization Lists
• Invite List for a party
• Daily to-dos
• Decluttering your thoughts
• Vacation Planning
• Work Schedules
• Doctor Appointments
• Bill payments
• Bucket Lists
• Book Lists
• Weekly Schedule
• Keeping track of exercise, mood, sleep, water intake
• Giving you peace of mind

In a nutshell, planners are used for creating plans.  You can use a planner for life goals or events as you go along the way.   These Goal Planners from Cultivate What Matters will get you there.

Your plans can be one day, recurring, scheduled and even unscheduled. Regularly using a planner and knowing your regular to-dos and doing them does allow you the flexibility to jump into unscheduled things.  

For example, if you know that every Wednesday your schedule is packed, but on Thursday afternoons you are always free, when someone calls you up to join in an event for the next day you’ll know what to do. 

If the next day is Wednesday you can quickly tell them you cannot join. If the next day they are asking about happens to be a Thursday, and the event is in the afternoon, you can easily say yes. So, as you can see, knowing your planner inside-out is a must.  

 

A planner is not something you refer to once a week or only when someone wants to make an appointment with you.  In order for a planner to actually be of any help to organize your life, you must review your planner daily. Sometimes, several times a day.

 

My Planner Story

A couple of years ago I bought four student planners from the Dollar Tree.  The covers were cute and it was back to school time when my stationery fixation goes into overdrive.  

 

When I posted photos of these on Instagram, people thought I was using them for my kids to be ready for back to school.  However, they were all for me, since I didn’t have a paper planner at the time.

 

In the first planner, I managed my social media. As a blogger, social media is highly important for getting the word out. I created my perfect schedule and kept it logged in my planner.  

 

My second planner was for my blog.  Creating a content calendar allows me each week to know what post I’m creating and when I’ll have time to research, write, edit, etc. 

 

The third planner was my homeschool planner (which I’ve upgraded to this one since then). This planner helped me to see how to fit in time to teach my newest student, who is a preschooler, and keep her occupied while the older ones have my attention.  

 

You may have not known that I also homeschool since I don’t chat about it a lot.  That’s because MomLife Organizer isn’t about homeschooling but helping moms get organized for life.

 

Lastly, the fourth one was my mommy at home planner.  This is the essential one that keeps my family going. Even if I should stop doing all of the above, our awesome purpose as moms will go on.  On the days that you may want to give up your schedule and your plans, that true purpose will stand, giving us hope that our days do matter.  

So my mommy planner kept things like appointments, goals, chore schedules and more. 

 

Of course, this isn’t the best way to use planners for organizing your life. 

This was just something that I did to keep everything separate and easy for me to find.  All of these areas of life can be organized inside of 1 planner. I’m still on the search for that.  I’ve used two different planners, plus the new homeschool one since I bought those from the Dollar Tree. 

My current one is beautiful and helpful (although still not exactly what I need). It’s called The Very Busy Planner by Amy Knapp.  You can see the quick flip-through review I did here:

 

 

This is just one type of planner. 

There are tons of planners that may work for you.  It takes time to explore the different ones, but Rachel over at Smart Mom Ideas has done a lot of the work for you with her Best Planners for Moms review.  

Can’t afford a fancy planner right now? 

No problem. I created a simple Day Planner that you can print off as many times as you need. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This day planner will allow you to keep track of what’s most important for your day including:

• The Top 3 Things to do in your day
• Any Calls, Appointments or Events going on that day
• A few of your current goals
• What to Focus on in the Week (in case you finish that day’s to-dos)
• An ongoing to-do list, for those things that you want to remember but can’t do that day
• And a notes area where you could put reminders, an inspirational quote or the menu for that day

 

My Day Planner comes in both pink, with cherry blossoms and blue, with a blue rose.  Depending on your mood for the day you could use either.  

 

How to Use a Planner to Stay Organized

 

Once you accept that your planner is now your best buddy, how to use a planner for life makes more sense. 

Start at night with writing down in your planner anything going on the next day that you haven’t yet. You may need your phone.  I get texts all of the time and forget to write down the times, days or locations of where I’m supposed to be going. I know it, but I don’t.  

Taking time in your evening routine to review and update your planner is a good idea. 

You can also set reminders on your phone, or in Evernote, for things that you might forget about.  But be careful.

You don’t want to ding yourself every hour to be scrambling to do a new task. Especially if you are a new mom, I highly recommend keeping your must-do list to 3 main tasks.

 

I’m not talking about cooking, laundry, and baths – those are ongoing tasks.  Maybe you need a reminder for those, but that should not be apart of your 3 things to get done that day.  This is how we lose momentum for using a planner and for organizing your life.  Don’t fall into the trap of mixing up ongoing tasks, goals, and projects.  

These are all separate and should be listed separately.  

 

The Difference between Ongoing Tasks, Tasks, Goals, and Projects

Ongoing tasks like washing the dishes can be placed on your list, however, you must know it is never completely finished.  It will only be done for that day. Ongoing tasks are better managed within a schedule or routine list, not a to-do list. Blank schedules do come inside of planners.  If not, you can always create your own or download this one for free.

 

Tasks are day to day things.  These are things you will want to list within your top 3 or on a working to-do list.  These also may recur but they tend to be, less often and more final.    

 

Goals are aspirations that are made up of a lot of little tasks in order to reach them.  I talk all about setting goals in these posts:

Beyond S.M.A.R.T., How to Crush Your Goals

What You Need to Know about Creating Goals : Life Organization 102

5 SMART Goal Setting Strategies Guaranteed to make you a Winner

 

And projects?  Projects actually fall under the umbrella of goals.  Projects are the type of goals that take careful work.  It’s best given as an example:   

 

A project may be cleaning out your garage.  While a goal would be to finish cleaning out your garage by March 31st by working at it for 45 minutes, twice a week while the baby is napping.

 

Projects would include redecorating your bedroom or knitting a baby blanket.  Goals would be to redecorate the whole house before that end-of-summer party. Tasks would include buying new paint for the bedroom.

 

Once you see the difference between these, make sure you mark out the difference in your planner.  

 

My Top 3 Planner Tips

 

I could say so much about planning and planners but since this post is so much longer than I expected it to get I will wrap up with my top 3 planner tips for beginners.  

 

How to Use Planners for Life Tip #1

Always write appointments in pencil.  If the appointment is with a friend or with your dentist, just pencil it in.  I cannot tell you how many times I’ve had to re-write an appointment.

 

How to Use Planners for Life Tip #2

Use only 1 paper planner.  There are lots of digital tools that you can use in conjunction with your paper planner, but for everyday life stuff, I would recommend just one.  And if you read through this post you know I have experience doing both. One downfall about using more than one planner for things of like nature is that you forget where you put something and you waste time hunting it down.  This is my current problem since I still use a separate planner for my blog work. I have a few notebooks where I jot notes and it’s confusing. 

 

How to Use Planners for Life Tip #3

Don’t get nailed down with format.  With all the new bullet journal rage going on, everyone tends to think their planner needs to be a certain format or design.  It doesn’t. Make sure your planner is functional for you – not them. If it’s too much work to make pretty spreads, don’t. If it costs too much, don’t buy that one.  You do you.

 

Want a simple but functional planner page?  Get your Day Planner today!