Half Yearly Notebook and Planner Check in

I cannot believe it is already half way through the year. With COVID 19, I feel like I’ve been in a time bubble and half the time I still think it is March (when we started lock down).

For this week’s post, I thought I would check in and talk through my different systems and how they have gone for me.

Pocket Notebooks

I use my pocket notebooks as a journal, to do list, memoir, menu planner, shopping list and finance tracker. It’s a bit of a catch all and I typically take it with me everywhere I go (not that there has been many places of late). I use the standard 3.5x5.5 inch notebook and for most part I will stick to the same pen or fountain pen ink throughout the entire notebook because I like the consistency of the same colour throughout.

I tried changing up my ink colours in one notebook (I know – a walk on the wild side!) and I didn’t like it. It feels neater in a small notebook to keep to the same colour consistently as the notes and scribbles inside are usually pretty messy. It just looks so much worse when its in different colours as well (to me anyway!). I may try this again and keep the same colour throughout a spread and see if that helps me OCD a bit.

So far, I have gone through 14 notebooks in the first half of this year (onto notebook #15). In the whole of 2019, I used 30 notebooks, so my usage has been pretty consistent.

Planner – home life and Pebble Stationery Co

I use an A5 Cahier notebook for my weekly planning for both my home life and daily tasks for Pebble Stationery Co. I also use it to prioritise goals for the week and month and to provide a rough timeline of notable dates for the year. It’s a bit of a catch all and stays on my desk nearly permanently.

This is the same system I used last year and as I described earlier this year in an Instagram post. I’ve added a small section at the bottom of each weekday to remind me what I’m cooking each day (so I remember to take the food out of the freezer when I’m working!).

This planner is supplemented by a plain notebook that I use to make notes, scribble ideas etc, which is dated (manually), but otherwise blank.

Work life system

This is the very new part of my system. For the first time, I tried the Traveler’s regular notebook size as a daily carry because I wanted something smaller if I had to haul my whole desk set up around with me daily (not that it lasted that long). My typical work notebook size of choice is A5 and I had never really warmed to the narrower notebook. Having used this size for a while, I find that the smaller size is nicer to physically carry day to day – I do enjoy that it is lighter. From a writing point of view, I find that it’s a bit narrow – my scrawl is a bit big and so sometimes I will write 3 words and the width of the page will have been taken up.

For my work specific set up, I initially started off with two notebooks – one as a daily planner (to set out my meetings and what not) and one as a general notebook. I got extremely grumpy with my daily planner notebook because it would not lay flat. Then when COVID hit and I started working from home full time, I stopped using the whole system because my entire routine was just out of whack. I then tried using the Bullet Journal method, which also didn’t work out for me, which I talked about here.

In the end, I changed it up to a Month to a page layout (to mark important meetings in advance) then I used a spread to plan goals and meetings each day. Very simple, but so far this has worked for me in the few weeks I’ve been using it.

And that’s it for notebooks and planning so far. How has your system worked out for you this year? Did COVID 19 disrupt your system? Share with me any tips and tricks you may have!