Episode 104: Planner Addiction Solutions to Keep Your Journals Focused & Purposeful
Do you find that you have too many paper planners and journals? Do you keep buying more of them? Do you feel like you can't stay consistent with them? Do you often wonder what you're going to do with the never-ending pile of stickers that you keep buying?
Listen, I, too, suffer from planner addiction and in this week's episode, I'm going to share what I'm doing with all of them and how you too can create focus with your journals.
Links mentioned during the show:
Transcript:
Do you find that you have too many paper planners and journals? Do you keep buying more of them? Do you keep feeling like you can't stay consistent with them? Do you often wonder what you're going to do with the never ending pile of stickers that you keep buying over and over again? Is it hard to walk into a hobby or craft store without thinking? Man, I really hope there's a coupon for this because I need more journals. You are not alone. I, too, suffer from planner addiction, and I have so many journals and planners.
In fact, this year, I recently shared.
On my Instagram stories how many planners I'm using. And while many of you said, oh.
My God, girl, me too, others seemed horrified at how many journals were sprawled.
Out across my floor.
Well, today, my friends, in this episode, which is episode 104, by the way, I'm going to be talking a little more about how I use my paper planners and stay productive and really make fun.
Have fun with them.
And I'm also going to be giving you some tips and strategies that you can use to keep your planners and journals more focused.
Don't worry, I won't be talking in this weird voice the entire episode, but I thought it went along with this fun music. Let's go ahead and get started.
Welcome to the Mindful Productivity Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Steckler, and this is the place to be to live a more mindful and productive life. If you're ready to turn daily chaos into calm and start your days with intention, then get ready to join me as we dive deep into mindful living and personal productivity. It's time to connect with your true self so you can live the life you want to live. And it all starts now.
Imagine with me for a moment a beautiful room filled with journals from brim to brim, some with golden foil and others with beautiful pastel prints with the front saying things like, you go girl or Dreamers got a dream. Or maybe there's some beautiful forest or mountainscape in the background saying, the mountains are calling me. There's endless journals, some with the most perfectly laid out interiors that you know your love, others dated just the way you need them, and others undated with a promise of the future. You gaze around and you look at all of the journals upon you and let's actually just get real for a minute. This isn't some magical Castle room. This is your own goddamn bookshelf and your own goddamn house. You guys, you own too many journals.
But no, really, are too many journals actually a thing?
I don't think so, because I, too, am a planner addict and I have.
So many notebooks and so many unfilled journals. But I buy them because journals and.
Notebooks are places that we keep our future dreams and hopes.
We buy journals not because we're like, OOH, it's pretty. I mean, that, too. But we also buy them because we go that is going to be where.
I write my novel, or that is where I'm going to start my morning pages practice. Or that there is where I'm going to use all of those stickers and those beautiful books with the elastic over.
The top of them that are just.
Stacked up somewhere in a basket. But I swear I'm going to use them because they're like $20 each, even though I've only spent about $10 on.
Each one because I'm so good at couponing. Seriously, though, today's episode is all about how we are going to overcome this, how we are going to move through and actually use our journals and our.
Notebooks that we've invested so, so much money. And most importantly, I'm going to tell.
You how you can start taking action with maybe three or four journals or planners that you've already purchased for this year and how you Canva start using them and how you could not feel bad for not using them consistently. Because let's be honest, I don't think we can all write a full page.
Spread in eight different journals and planners every single day. That's ambitious. I, too, thought I could do that.
I ordered journals from Japan and all over these places. And I don't know why I'm talking the way I am today. It just feels good to just be a little extra. But today I want to talk to.
You about some strategies that we can use.
So let's get into it.
Let's stop the weird voices, Sarah.
And I'm going to get into the.
Good stuff here with the tips.
Okay. So one of the first things that I think is really important to do is to actually go through your journals because I took the time to do this recently. And if you follow me on Instagram, you might have seen it in my Instagram stories. But I actually took out all of the journals that I had purchased in the past. I'd say eight months there's usually by the end of the year between, I don't know, August to December, honestly, is when I have a hard time not buying more planners. That's also kind of like planner season when they're coming out, the new ones and everything. And so I went through the ones that I had bought, the ones that I typically buy every year. I also bought, like, a bunch of new journals and planners to try out this year, including the Hobanichi planners, which I got into. Like, I bought my first one, the Hobanichi weeks, which and if you have no idea what I'm talking about, go to my blog, go Mindful Productivity Podcast.com, and check out the Hawaii Chi Buying Guide, because I walk you through what all of these Japanese planners are and why they're so amazing and the reason why I love them.
And I think the reason why they're, like, really popular right now is because they lay flat. They're in these really cute sizes and they have this Tamo River paper which if you've never experienced before, it's this really, really thin paper and you can like write on it with some pretty decently thick pens and you can even do like watercolor painting on them and they don't really bleed through. And then the paper also kind of gets this like, I don't know, crispy crinkly texture to it after you've written on it. And it's just like really aesthetically pleasing. Like the whole experience. It's kind of like the first time if you've ever bought like a really nice pen. I remember I think I was like graduated from high school or something. And my mom bought me like a cross pen that was really expensive. And I never understood why people were so into expensive pens until I wrote with one. And I was like, this is a completely different experience. Anyway, that's one of the reasons why I love those journals. So I got a bunch of those. Not a bunch, but I got quite a few different kinds because I really wanted to not only go through them and take photos of them and try them out for you guys in my business and on the blog and everything.
But I also wanted to see like, is this something that I could sustainably use for different things in my own life? So I bought a couple of those. I also bought some naughty planners and I'm trying to get back into doing well, not more, but start doing YouTube videos consistently. And one of the things I found is that I really like doing those overhead videos with like planner walkthroughs because I feel like if I can get the lighting right then I can just record a video real quick and not do a bunch of fancy editing. I am not a fancy editing person with YouTube. There's some amazing people out there like Matt, Davella and all those people that do like cinematic productivity videos and stuff and that's never going to be me. So I'm really more of a podcast girl. But anyway, I digress. I want to do some video walk throughs of all the journals that I have. So Unfortunately I don't think I'm realistically going to be able to link everything I'm talking about today from the podcast on the show notes. But I will get a YouTube video up and usually if you guys bug me enough on Instagram messages or in my DMs, then I usually will move it on my priority list to get it out quicker.
So I bought some homony cheap planners, I bought some Nullty planners. And then I have my planners that I use. So I use the Mindful Productivity Planner and I use the Daily Productivity and Brandnet book real quick.
Side note about those.
So these are planners that I created. The Mindful Productivity Planner came out in December 2018 and then the Brain Dump book followed a couple of months later in February of 2019. And using these myself has been really fun. And one thing that was really interesting to me is I thought that I would use the Mindful Productivity planner, like every single day. But what I found is I actually really like to use that planner for myself. Care planner. So I like to go through and do there's a Month at a glance page, and I like to go through there and write down, like, my self care goals and kind of more of my personal goals and stuff. And then that weekly section is where I'm keeping track of the things that I'm doing for my mental health and exercise, stuff like that. And then sometimes I even use those weekly sections to Journal every day. So that's how I've been using that. But because it's undated. Right. And this is why I created it. You Canva stop and start wherever you need to so you can pause your planning. So I've had that planner since I created it, and I haven't filled it all up yet.
And so I want to be really honest about how I'm using my planners, but I still use it and I still take it with me and I still reference it a lot. But I haven't been using that planner every single day or every single week. I'd say I use it more on a monthly basis, and some months I use it the whole month, but not every month. What I have been using every single day, maybe there's one day a week where I don't use it is the Daily Productivity and Brain Dump book. And I love to take that with me to the coffee shop. Again, you can find these on Amazon. You can find them by going to my productivity blog.com, and you can see like a description. And I have videos of them and more stuff. But I use the Daily Productivity and Brand Book almost every day specifically for my business. But I also use sections of it to kind of map out what's going on in my head regardless. And this has really been a game changer in my business. And being able to focus, keep my mind focused, and get out all of my thoughts.
And what I really like to do is do that brand dump, map out my two focus projects for the day on the opposite page, because there's a brain dump spread. Every day has a two page spread. So there's a brain dump on the left, and then on the right side, there is a section where you fill out your two focus projects after you've done your brain up and what all those subtasks are and kind of like map out your day and how it's unfolding and what you're doing. So that's been really helpful. And then once a week I go through that and I go through all my brain dump stuff, the stuff that hasn't been completely organized. And I will take those things and put them either into a master task list, which I'm making another planner for my whole planning paper system because that's what works best for me. And then I integrate that into Asana or an online productivity tool, project management system. And that's what's been working really well for me for those. So I have all those journals. I also have a couple let me see what I have. I have a personal planner that I just bought from Michaels.
There was a kikik came out with a line that was, I think, exclusive to Michael's. And they had some vegan leather planners, which I got really excited about. That was really nice. And I don't know if they're discontinuing this line. I literally just ordered another one that has a different pattern. But I'm going to be using that as more of my reference thing that I bring with me. So I'll have to do a video walk through because I feel like listing out how I'm using all these won't make as much sense as it will on a video with me, like showing you the pages and the spreads and what things look like so you can get a visual. But I wanted you to kind of know a little bit of backstory about kind of like what I'm working with personally. So that when I talk to you about these strategies and ways to use your paper planning, you can kind of be like, oh, okay, that kind of makes sense. So the first thing is that I don't think you need to stress about finding one main planner that you use, like the whole year.
A lot of people talk about finding planner peace. And I think it's possible. But I don't think that that means you have to only find one planner because there's different types of planning right. There's memory keeping, there is functional planning that's a lot more messy, where you're not worrying about what it looks like. And then there's just like fun. I guess I'd call it like scrapbook planning, where you're using a lot more stickers or maybe you're drawing or creating doodles, right. Even within the bullet Journal community or the boujeau community, whatever hashtag you're using. Even in those communities, there is a big difference between people that are creating bullet Journal pages that are really just like pieces of art. And obviously they're spending hours on a spread versus people that are just trying to get stuff done right. So taking that into consideration. But what I would get clear on before you even get into your journals is instead of looking at a Journal and going, what could I use this Journal for? Instead? Take a step back and look at like, you know, if you've got a word of the year or if you've got your, let's say two to three main kind of focus goals that you want to work on for the year, think about what those are and then think about how you can put those into a planner.
That for me, makes the whole thing a lot easier. Because if I look at a planner and then try to shape my goal or my life plan around that planner, that just feels a little backwards to me. The other thing I want to say real quick, too, is there are a lot of dated planners that you might have you may even have dated planners back from a couple of years ago that are super beautiful, and you might be tempted to think that they're worthless now or that you should throw them away because there are dates in them. But I want to challenge you that especially if you're functional planning dates don't matter. There are so many beautiful planners out there that you can still use, that you can still write notes on, that you can still plan out your week on and just not worry about the dates. In fact, there are like sticker kits out there. You can buy from Etsy shops or all online, all kinds of stuff. You can actually just put stickers like dated stickers over the dates, or you can just cross them out or you can just not worry about it and not look at them.
It doesn't have to be this big rule in your life. The other thing, too, I want to speak to you just kind of like mindset wise, is that it's so powerful to write things down. So I would really just get in the habit of thinking that it's more important that you actually are writing things down, ideas in your brain, thoughts that you have, stuff you want to do. It's more important that you're writing down those goals and those to do items than it is worrying about what they look like on paper or if they're in the right Journal or if that makes sense, just write them down. Because again, your brain is not a storage facility, right? I say that all the time. So let's get into some more tangible things to consider. So first of all, get clear on what your main goals are for the year, like the main things that you want to track. I'll give you a couple of examples. So I have quite a few journals. And one of the things that I want to get better about tracking specifically is like kind of stuff that's going on with my pets.
So I have a Bulldog named Bella. We have a cat named Dublin. And it seems like with my Bulldog, I don't know if you guys have pets. It's like there's always something going on. Like every season she gets yeasty ears or like, I won't get into all of this right? Or like something's different and I have to keep track of it. And more often than not, like, she's five now and I've noticed there are patterns, but I can't put my finger on when exactly. They're happening because I haven't been keeping track of it. So I'm actually going to dedicate a little tiny Journal I have specifically to Bella and Dublin and just keeping a recording of their health, of any medication I have to give them when I'm cleaning her ears, blah, blah, blah. And I recently went to Michael's and there was this whole sticker pack of pet stickers. So I thought that would be perfect. And the other thing is that I was trying to think of how I wanted to do this. And at first I have a bunch of different dated planners. And I thought, oh, I'll just use a dated planner to track everything.
And then I started kind of getting overwhelmed. Like, well, it's dated. So maybe I would have to do it every single day or every single week. And I don't know if I can keep up with that. And then it was like, okay, here's the thing. One. You can use a blank Journal or a dated Journal, but if you did use a dated Journal and this is my message to all of you, too. Just because you use a dated planner doesn't mean that you have to use it or fill out every single day or every single week. This may sound really obvious to people that aren't super type A, but if I see a blank section in a Journal, I get, like, all weird and anxious about it. And I'm like, I got a Bella. That what's happening. And so just giving yourself that break that you can actually just use a Journal, and then you can just fill it in when you need to. So I can have this Journal for Bella and I can fill it in when I need to. Like, oh, look, she had an ear infection in January on the fifth, let's say.
So I'm going to write that down and maybe, like, nothing else happened worth noting for the rest of the month, that's okay. So just giving yourself that break that you can have journals that you use intermittently, they don't have to be filled out completely in order for you to get value from them, in order for you to use them. So that's the first thing getting clear on what your journals are going to be used for. And once you have a better idea of what each Journal is going to be used for, then you can make it then it's a lot simpler to kind of fill stuff in as you go. So, for example, one thing that I've noticed is that I don't know if you guys do this, but you get a couple different planners that you really like. I'm actually flipping through an old moleskin bullet Journal that I started in, like, 2016 right now, because there's a couple of things I want to mention. But one thing I've noticed is that I'll get a bunch of planners that I like. I just love the way they look. And I'll think, oh, I'll just do multiple.
Please tell me I'm not the only one that has done this.
I'll just do multiple weeks and months.
For, like, the exact same week, but in different planners, so that I can use different Steckler so I can take different pictures of those spreads. And it gets a little ridiculous, right? I think if you're doing that from a scrapbooking perspective because it's fun and you enjoy it and maybe one of them is like memory keeping and the other one is functional, then that's one thing. But just to stay up with it because you're getting anxious or neurotic about it, like me, is kind of a little ridiculous. But if you do have multiple planners, what I would suggest doing is giving each one of them a theme. So, for instance, I have a Hobanichi tattoo cousin that I'm using. And again, go to my blog. You can see a complete review. Well, not a review, but a buying guide of all the differences between them. And I'll probably do, like, I should do an Instagram Live or something this week, too, about the ones I use so I can give you guys a flip through. But I use that one for my business. And so those pages, I'm not only planning kind of my weeks and my days and what I'm doing in there, but then I'm also using the daily because they have daily pages.
I'm using those daily pages for business related notes. So if I have an idea for a client that I'm working with or course materials or I'm watching a webinar and I want to write stuff down or take notes, or I'm reading, like a business book. I'm usually always reading a couple of different business books on mindset or marketing whatever, every month. Then I will take notes specifically in that Journal. And again, for those daily pages, I'm not worrying about the date at all. In fact, I don't even look at the date anymore. And what's cool about the Hobanichi is that everything that's printed on the page is so subtle that you can overlook things really easily. Because as soon as you start writing with your ink on the page, that's going to stand out more than the date. If that makes sense. It's faded enough. So that's how I use that one. And then I have this other Journal that I'm going to use to track Bella's stuff. Right? And then I have a Hobaniji weeks, which these are so adorable because they're about the same height. They're like an a five height, but they're half of the size width wise, so they kind of fit like they're kind of like a wallet size.
In fact, I bought there's a ton of Facebook groups online, too, that you can join that talk about ways to use all these different kinds of planners. It's so fun. And somebody recommended buying a you know how you can go on Amazon, you can buy anything, but they have those waitress notebooks, I guess, covers. It's basically like something that you could buy if you're like a waitress or whatever at a restaurant and you Canva put in your notepad in there. But you can also slip in the hobbiti weeks fits into those so you can get creative with the coverage you use. But anyway, one of those is going to be specifically for tracking like my fitness and my steps. And so where I'm going with this is once you've kind of mapped out specific themes for maybe different planners, you're going to use one. You don't have to use each one of them every single week or even every single month. It's okay. A trick I like to use is if there's a bunch of pages that I don't use or just like a couple of spreads I don't use, I will even just tape them together with straight up tape.
Or I will put a piece of washi tape, like I'll put them all together and I'll put a piece of washi tape over the edge of all of those. So they all just stick together so I don't even have to worry about that. Right. I just didn't use that section. No big deal. And then what is so great about creating a theme for these is that you can then know what you can use your monthly spread for. So instead of having three planners and then every February being like, I guess I got to write down the same thing I did every February in all different three of these sections. Instead, you can have a different theme for every month. So, for example, in my fitness hobaneti weeks, I'm doing fitness in my hobanichi weeks. This episode is so freestyle today. I hope you don't mind. And that one in every month spread, right. For every little block day of the month, I'm writing down my steps or I'm writing down how many ounces of water I'm drinking. Right. So I'm not writing down like if I had a dentist appointment or blah, blah, blah. I'm just writing down one thing every month.
Another cute thing I've seen people do is just put a sticker in every day of the month. So you could even have a sticker planner where basically you're writing down maybe something cute about your day or something you're grateful for and you're just using it to use up your stickers. Ain't nothing wrong with that. And that's just kind of a fun little hobby, too, that you can do throughout the month. Other ideas for things that you can write down during the month would be like you could write down something that you're grateful for. That's kind of the same premise if you have my book 100 Life Challenges, which you can get in Burns and Noble and Target on Amazon. I know. I think it was in chapter one to go in Canva a couple other stores. You guys always let me know where you find it. I don't know all the stores it's in, but if you use that one, the first challenge in there is actually writing down something you're grateful for for the first 30 days. And that's kind of how that's mapped out as it's like a calendar view. So you could write down something that you're grateful for every day of the month.
You could write down everything that you're eating just for breakfast or just for dinner. You could write down how much you're spending that day. And then it's kind of a cool way to look back at your whole month and just see that one thing tracked for the first through the 31st or whatever. It's really cool to kind of see that at a glance. So that's one way that you can kind of like focus your journals a little bit more. Also, I really encourage you to write down your annual goals and what you want to accomplish for the year, and then create sections within your Journal or your planner to track your progress of those goals. So, for example, let's say you've made an ambitious goal to read, like 52 books this year, right? Then create a section specifically in your planner or your Journal. And again, it doesn't have to look a certain way. There's always blank space somewhere in certain pages. Or you could even go to a.
Week that you missed, and you could.
Use that as your section for this. But if your plan is to read a certain amount of books or whatever, then create an actual section in your planner or Journal where you're tracking that specific goal. It's not enough to just write down that you want to do something. You also need to find a tangible way to achieve that goal, obviously, and break it down. And again, if you can break that thing down into Sprints and Focus projects, monthly tasks, quarterly tasks, weekly and daily tasks, and so on and so forth, then you're more likely to accomplish it. Right? But if you want to read a certain amount of books, then create a section where you're maybe keeping a list of those books. Maybe you have like a bookshelf of sorts that you write down those books, and then maybe you highlight them as you're reading them or as you're starting them. And then you can kind of keep track of the books you're reading. And then you Canva also add those things to Goodreads. Goodreads.com is an awesome place where you can track your reading. And I'm a big fan of both writing things down and then having other tools that help me stay consistent with what I'm doing in my planner.
So you can do a hybrid of both online and in your planner. The other thing, too. And I know I've touched on this, but it's like, it's so important to stop making some rules about how you have to plan about if pages need to look good and to stop doing stuff for the gram. I know it's really tempting to try to make a weekly spread beautiful so that you can throw it up on Instagram or whatever. But truthfully, it's also really fun to just plan for yourself and just have a planner or Journal that you just are using for yourself. Not everything we do has to be showcased on social media. I know that's obvious. But seriously, giving yourself the freedom to think your own thoughts, to write down your ideas and not worry about the fact that maybe I shouldn't write that down because I don't want that on a public Instagram post. Just don't do it. Just keep things for yourself. You Canva create beautiful things just for yourself and not share them. There's nothing selfish about that. In fact, that's actually a really beautiful self care activity that you can do for yourself.
You are worth something beautiful without even sharing it. Sometimes it's okay. So quit making the dumb rules if you can. And also too, just to remind you that there is a big difference between memory planning, decorative scrapbook planning, and functional planning. And I'll have to go into this in more detail too, and kind of like what I do. But I love functional planning and that's essentially what I'm doing in my business notebook and in my daily productivity and brain numb book. I'm not doing that to make things look pretty. In fact, my handwriting gets consistently more and more messy in those pages because I am writing as fast as I can. When I get in flow with my brain and I'm getting stuff out of my brain onto paper, a lot of that stuff I don't ever need to read again. It doesn't even need to be legible because that's I'm literally brain dumping and decluttering my mind. If there are ideas where I'm like, oh, that's a good idea for a planner or course or something I want to teach my students, then I will write it more legibly in an additional task section that I do have on those weekly spreads, but otherwise it's just functional planning.
So the only reason that it's there is to help me get more done. So again, not worrying about what it's looking like. The last thing I want to talk about today. I feel like we Canva talk about so much more when it comes to planning, and I'd love to hear kind of how you guys use paper planners also. But schedule time in your planner, right? Put a time on your planner like in your weekly as you're planning, and then put something on your Google calendar, whatever you use to schedule time to check in on your task list and your projects and your to do list. There is something really amazing about having awareness of what you need to do. Even if you have a list of 100 things that you need to do in the next month, you're going to feel so much less stressed knowing what those things are and knowing that you looked at it. Even if you still feel overwhelmed, you're going to feel less overwhelmed knowing that you're scheduling time to manage it. I'm telling you, the more overwhelmed I feel, that will only expand and grow into even more sheer, overwhelming stress if I keep avoiding it.
The more time I take to look at things, the better. And what's great is that sometimes you'll look at a list and then you can get real with yourself about how many of these things are still priorities, how many of these things have not been taken care of for the past month and nothing has caught on fire. Maybe I can actually put these to the wayside and not worry about doing them or drop them completely, right? So you can actually go through every week and you may find that your to do list can actually decrease in size by quite a bit as you get more intentional and aware of what you need to do. So those are some tips for all you planner addicts out there. I'd love to hear how you use your own journals and planners, what you're using this year, what your favorites are. I also love to hear kind of just like what your favorite pens are and stationery geek out about this stuff. It is just my dream. Whenever I have free time, I am deep within my journals using stickers and planning. I think it's one of the most fun things that we can do with our free time.
So that's a big hobby of mine, but I'd love to hear from you. So come on over, tag me on Instagram. That's where I'm usually hanging out. I'm at Mindful Productivity Blog, and if you're still listening to I always forget to do this until the very end of the podcast. But I am in the process of creating something really new and amazing. And if you're a creative online entrepreneur, I invite you to go on over to Creativehivemind.com and check it out. I have something new coming in the works that will be popping up in spring of this year. And all I will say about this so far is that there is a virtual coworking community in the work, so there's going to be materials in there and a whole framework that helps you organize your life in your business and stay accountable and on top of the details of your business and how you can turn your focus projects into profit producers. But we're also going to be having online virtual coworking office hours. And I'm so excited about this. This is something that we do inside of Publish With Purpose, which is my online program that helps you create, format, and self publish your own Journal or planner on Amazon in 60 days or less.
And currently right now we're going through round two. It's so amazing. People already are creating their planners and have the proofs on their way and it's so exciting. I can't wait to share what they're creating in round two but one of the things we do inside of there is we have Journal formatting coworking office hours and it's amazing how much we get done in that time because we all get on Zoom and then I'm there to answer questions as things come up and people just get a lot done. There's something about being in a focus session with people. So creative hive mind is this new online community that I'm creating that is for creative entrepreneurs and we're going to be having virtual coworking sessions. We're going to be having monthly Q and a calls and it's all going to be about doing the work, not worrying about consuming more content or going through more course materials inside of this. It's going to be about getting you to take action and how when you create a focus project and I help you do that going to be helping you to do that inside this community you can get a lot more done.
You'd be surprised what you can get done in 60 minutes that you might think would take you three or 4 hours. You can actually get it done in 1 hour so it's really cool stuff. Anyway, head on over to creative HiveMind to get on the waitlist for that and as always, you can always find more resources by visiting the blog over Mindful productivity podcast. Thanks for listening. I know so many of you listen to this every single Monday and it just warms my heart. I love hearing about what you're getting out of this podcast so have a great week ahead and here is the paper planning.
