A few months ago I published an overview of my new weekly review format. I had been successfully using it for a few months at the time, and I have since continued to use it until about a month ago. Since then I’ve tweaked it a bit to streamline things and speed up the review process. If you found my previous review format a bit confusing or elaborate, you might want to try my new one.
The new review format consists of four questions that I answer at the end of every week before I build next week’s plan. I write down my answers in my regular journal (currently the Stalogy 365 B6) using last week’s plan as a reference. Here are the new questions:
What Worked – no change from last time, except that I allow myself to elaborate more and I don’t emphasize the order of the things that I did and that I want to keep doing. I discovered that it doesn’t really matter if something worked because I changed things, remained consistent or stopped doing something, the only thing that really matters is that it worked. Being more loose here allows me to spend more time reflecting positively on the week instead of worrying about writing things in a certain order. An example from the past week – exercise. I got a 10k in, my first speed run since my last race, two gym sessions, two swimming sessions, two rucking sessions and a bunch of walking and NTC pre and post workout stretches. Prioritizing these sessions in my weekly plan, doing them first thing in the morning and setting out workout clothes and gym/pool bags the night before really aided my success.
What Didn’t Work – this changed slightly to not only include things that didn’t work due to planning, priorities, “life” or infrastructure but also things that cause me anxiety or distress that need some rethinking. An example from the past week – I went back to watching YouTube videos as a “self soothing” source of comfort. We live in stressful times and I’m going through a stressful period at work, so it’s clear that I need something to provide this “warm blanket” function. The issue is that I oftentimes use reading as a source of comfort, and I’m currently reading a book that is purposefully designed to induce anxiety in the reader. Note that at this point I’m not focusing on what to do about the things that didn’t work. My point is just to acknowledge them and if relevant name the feelings they induce.
What’s Next – this is the biggest difference from the previous review format. Here I write down what I plan to try and keep or change or observe in the coming week. This feeds directly into my weekly plan, and will help me get the most out of last week’s experiences. So in the case of the examples above, I’m going to keep to an identical general exercise plan in the coming week, and I’m going to add a “comfort book” to my current reading rotation. If anything more long term needs to happen due to these reviews I will just add it to my quarterly plan. The point is not just to blindly follow a plan, but to try things, observe, reflect and change them if needed.
You’ll note that I removed the “people of the week” section. I just found it redundant, as these three questions generally cover it.
As usual, I’d love to hear more about your weekly review formats, and if you found this helpful.
I previously discussed how I plan my quarter, my week and my days, but there’s another side to planning: reviewing. The goal isn’t to set out a plan, then attempt to follow it and disregard any successes or failures in the process, but rather to take the time to figure out what tweaks and changes need to take place for your plan to work better for you. And remember – the plan works for you, you don’t work for the plan.
I’ve tried various review formats over the years, some were more successful than others, but here’s what I’ve come to realize: the weekly review is more crucial to the success of a quarterly plan (a 13 week year) than a quarterly review. I still perform a review of the previous quarter before planning the next one, but the weekly review is where the keys to happiness lie.
After a good amount of trials and errors, here’s the weekly review format that I’ve been using over the past few months and that has been working:
The weekly review format
What Worked – this is where I write down things that I did differently (first priority), consistently (second priority) and well (third priority) during the past week. The focus is things that I can learn from to take with me to the next week and to weeks following it. An example from the past week: I changed my running form, and had a faster series of runs that also felt better. This change required effort, but the results mean that it’s something I want to keep doing. The effort was worth it and it’s something that I want to emphasize for next week’s plan.
What Didn’t Work – this isn’t an opportunity for me to beat myself up. The point is to notice where my plans were too ambitious and need refactoring, where the context changed and my plan lacked enough flexibility to account for that, and where I need more infrastructure. What’s infrastructure? It’s the things you do ahead of time to help you build up consistent success: plan the next day every day, put reminders for everything, set out clothes for tomorrow (particularly exercise clothes). Have present you help future you make the decisions you want them to make. An example from the past week: I did not do well with my social connection goals. I didn’t take into account the fact that I had several busy evenings that week, and so ended up not making the calls that I wanted to make. I was more careful to add time for morning phone calls and visits into my schedule, and I cut down on the number of calls that I planned on making, which made this week much better. Context is crucial when planning. (Yes, you need to schedule these things and not do them spontaneously because otherwise you won’t do them. You’ll tell yourself that the Like on the Instagram post counts as staying in touch with your friends. It doesn’t. It counts for a billionaire’s bottom line.)
One Win – this may seem redundant, as the “what worked” is there, but I still think that this is important. We don’t take the time to celebrate our wins, even tiny ones, and then we feel depressed and go on shopping sprees, social media binges, etc to get a bit of a dopamine hit. Even if your week sucked, there was something in it worth celebrating. I try where possible to make it something that I did, but sometimes its something that happened to me. An example from the past week: I had a tough conversation with someone at work that ended up in us reaching a compromise that is much better than I thought that I could achieve. We both felt better after that conversation, even though neither of us wanted to have it.
One Challenge – this is something that I learned this week that is worth gearing up and preparing for. It’s a chance for the “anxiety” character in your mind to be productive in a safe environment. I don’t always fill this in, but I want it to be there to let me have space for this if I need to. An example can be feeling like you’re about to be come sick or are maybe are on the verge of an explosive situation at work or at home. This is a chance to note it, figure out if it’s a real challenge or an imagined one, and prepare to avoid it or deal with it. A past example: I felt a shoulder strain coming on, so I changed my training days and exercises around. Another example: I talked to my boss about my need to have a bit more variety in my work after I realized that I was getting progressively bored with the tasks that I was given.
People of the Week – so important – this is for people that made your week or that you want to particularly remember after the week you’ve had. They can be friends that came to your rescue, colleagues that made your day, family members that were there for you, or mentors and heroes that helped motivate you. I try to make it people that I know personally and not figures from the news or celebrities. No examples here, as this is too personal.
I write this review on Friday or Saturday in my regular journal, longhand. I then check if my weekly plan needs to change due to it. It takes me about 30 minutes, because I spend time thinking about it. Focusing on the wins and positive people in my life, working to continue with the successes and mitigate the failures, and looking with clear eyes and a level head to the challenges ahead helps make me happy. That’s the point of these reviews, and that’s why I do them.
Do you do a weekly review? What format do you use?
It’s the beginning of January, and usually at this point people’s resolutions are starting to unravel. For years I used to do yearlygoals but over 2024 I moved to using a 13 week year, or quarterly planning model. It affords me more flexibility and seasonality in my planning, and it’s a good, low stakes way to start long term planning and goal setting if you’ve never done it before.
There are those that say that you should go on a retreat to plan your year or quarter, and I’m sure that’s nice if you can afford to do it but unfortunately I can’t. What I do instead is take some time in the weekend before the end of a quarter to plan the next quarter, and this is the process I go through, step-by-step.
How I Plan A Quarter
I start my planning on a piece of scrap paper, sitting with my calendar, and start mapping out what big block of “stuff” I have next quarter. In particular I take Travel into account at this point. If I have a trip planned, then it means that I will have less time for non-trip related stuff this quarter, and I need to realize that I have less than 13 weeks to work on the rest of my goals. So if I have a week long trip, I calculate that I have only 11 weeks to work on the rest of my stuff. Why 11 and not 12? Because there’s time that will go to trip related stuff before and after I return, and it takes time after a trip to get back into routine.
Once that’s done and I realize how much actual time I have to achieve any goals, I divide my plan into Large Categories.These are areas I want to work on throughout the next quarter, and they generally stay the same from quarter to quarter.
Working Within Categories
The different categories I work on are the backbone of my plan, the basis of the quarter which I flesh out with detail during my planning session. For me these currently are (not in order of importance): Health and Fitness, Reading, Conversations, Mental Health, Creative Projects, Productivity, Professional Development, Blog, Decluttering, Money.
Page 1 of my Q1 2025 plan
I set individual goals for each category, all of them measurable, and this is the plan that I reference at least once a week, usually two or three times.
Wherever possible I set up the Streaks App and/or a tracker for the goals in my weekly plan. This makes sure that 60-70% of my goals are set on “auto pilot” and are included in every weekly and daily plan. I address the rest of my goals either when I plan my week, or not at all.
Wait, what?
Page 2 of my Q1 2025 plan
I deliberately include goals that I know that I will have to stretch or significantly stretch to get to every quarter. Why? Because I view these goals not just as a plan, but as a call to action, a bit of a challenge. A good quarter is one where I got to 80% of my goals. I great quarter is one where I got to 90% of my goals, and if I ever get to 100% of my goals, then I’ve likely not been ambitious or creative enough when setting them.
Page 3 of my Q1 2025 plan.
Life tends to throw us curveballs, and so I leave wiggle room in my plan (there are goals that I mark ahead of time as less important, and entire categories that I’m willing to neglect if things get to that), and room to recreate the plan from scratch if the need arises. The plan works for me, it’s a tool that I use, it’s not something that I have to tie myself in knots over. I refuse to beat myself up for missing a goal, because if I missed a goal it just means that:
It was poorly planned.
Circumstances/context significantly changed (a war broke out, a pandemic broke out, a family member or I got non-trivially sick, I got injured, etc).
It was a “stretch goal”.
In this case I expect myself to rethink my goals and what I want to achieve, and replan them.
A bit about my current categories and how I planned out each one:
Health and Fitness – the most “auto pilot” of my planning categories and absolutely non-negotiable. I’ve been working with largely the same goals in this category for months and sometimes years, so this is the quickest and easiest category for me to plan. It’s also one where I have the most trackers set up for: there’s a tracker for my running, swimming, gym workouts, NTC workouts and food logging. I use various health and fitness apps that track these, and the Streaks app to make sure that I work on this category daily. As a cancer patient in remission, I am not messing around with my health or my exercise routine. It’s also a must for my mental health, even though that’s tracked in a different category. If possible I try to have a road race to train for each quarter, though usually I only have 2-3 races a year, and last year I only had one. The food logging is something I do to make sure that I’m getting the fibre, protein, calcium and other nutrients I need, and keeping my saturated fat and sodium intakes relatively low.
Reading – pretty self explanatory, this category has been with me for years. I try to read between 2-4 books a month, and this reflects this.
Conversations – this category is all about having real conversations with people – not just liking their posts and messaging them. I set a goal of meeting certain people face to face for coffee, a meal or any sort of outing, and another for talking with friends that are abroad on zoom. Beyond this I have weekly recurring goals of calling people – usually between 1-3 friends a week. Yes, you need to schedule and track this. You’re busy, it’s easier and less risky to message people and so we stop calling them or meeting up with them, and we trick ourselves into thinking that these messages are the same as having a real conversation with these people. It’s not the same. It’s worth investing time and effort into this, I promise. Even if you have social anxiety, even if you’re very busy. I’m going for a minimum of six 1:1 get togethers with friends, and 3 zoom calls (though I’ll likely get 5-6 zoom calls in).
Mental Health – most of this category is automatically tracked in the Streaks app and is part of my daily plan and daily routine. I suffer from cancer related PTSD so I don’t neglect this stuff. If I do the panic attacks return and I physically dread them, so this, like the Health and Fitness category, is a non-negotiable category. It always happens. What goes in here? Journaling, daily gratitude (goes in my journal), meditation, and other things that I may write about later in a separate post.
Creative Projects – this is a fun category, and it’s here to remind myself to enjoy my life. It included sketching goals, Lego building goals, photography goals, etc. I try to get at least half the things in this category done.
Productivity – this is here mostly as a reminder to plan every day, plan my week, and perform a shutdown routine on workdays so I don’t think about work when I’m not at work.
Personal Development – these are professional personal goals, usually tied to learning new skills or obtaining a certain certification.
Blog – I used to track this as part of my creative projects, but as I ended up neglecting this blog for a month or two last year, I separated this to its own category so that I can give it more focus. This is tied to a weekly tracker and just tracks the amount of posts I publish a week.
Decluttering – lists things that I want to get out of my house over the next quarter. Simple enough.
Money – this is a list of money related things that I want to take care of – pension and investment reviews and plans, saving up money for certain goals, reducing certain bills, etc. This is a useful category because if you’re anything like me then this is something that you dread and will put off unless you force yourself to be really on it.
Since I’ve been working with most of these categories for a long time and since many of them are repeatable, much of my planning is just reviewing and copying over last quarter’s plan. The rest of the plan is things that I put a bit of effort into researching before I commit to, sometimes drafting them a few times before settling on my final quarterly goals.
I hope this inspires you to create your own quarterly plan. Let me know if it does and if there’s anything else you want to know about my planning setup.
This is the second post on this topic. For an explanation on the 13 week year read this post.
As life tends to constantly throw curveballs at me, planning ahead in short bursts has proven to be invaluable. During the previous quarter my dad went through an unexpected open-heart surgery and I realized that I’d have to find a new apartment in the not so distant future. If I had planned ahead for an entire year (goals/themes, the system is immaterial), I would have had to scrap all my plans on February. As it was, I made a few minor adjustments, and finished not so far from where I originally planned.
Just before this 13 week/quarter started I got some bad news about my cat. That’s going to affect my plans, which I made before I realized that he was likely dealing with cancer. That’s OK – my plans are short term enough to allow me to easily change them, and I’ve already built plenty of wiggle room into the plans that I made. Unlike themes, which I find to be to vague to be useful, or yearly plans, which are too long term to be practical in my circumstances, 13 week planning allows for just enough time to make meaningful progress in the key areas of my life whilst being short enough to allow me to quickly pivot if necessary.
How I Make a 13 Week Plan
This is my third round with 13 week planning, and I’m getting progressively better at it. Here’s what I do that’s been working so far:
List all the roles and areas in my life and make sure I’m covering all of them. Some examples of the areas I use: Health and Fitness, Reading, Mental Health (important enough for me with my PTSD to have it under a separate area), Conversations (meaningful connections with friends – that’s face to face get togethers or one on one phone calls or zoom meetings, not WhatsAapp messages), French, Creative Projects, Film Photography (more on that in a separate post), Professional Development (this is the only work related stuff that I track at home), Decluttering (trying to prepare for a future move), Drawing, Blog, Money. Yes there are a lot of them, yes it’s worth listing everything down and addressing as much of it as you can with your plan.
Figure out measurable goals that can be reached during the 13 week stretch. Where possible I set a bare minimum, easily achievable goal, and then stretch goals. So for instance the minimum reading goal is 6 books, with 8 books and 10 books as my stretch goals. This means that if the unexpected happens, it’s almost always only my stretch goals that are affected. It also means that I’m not setting myself up to say: “this is impossible, why even bother?” Every little bit helps, and it helps to be kind to your future self.
Set up various scaffolds and aides to your goals. Wherever possible I use the app “Streaks” to help me hit my goals. I also use the great NRC (Nike Run Club) app to help me keep track of my running goals and challenge me there, and I schedule as many things as possible in my calendar ahead of time. GoodReads has a reading challenge that helps me track books. Then there is my weekly planning session, where I build up next week’s plan. During that time I go over all of my goals for the quarter and make sure that I’m hitting at least a few of them that week.
When executing your plan, break things down to monthly, weekly and daily goals. Whether it’s X amount of running sessions a month, X minutes of exercise a week, or how much time you spent away from screens every day, the longer term goals need to be broken down to shorter term chunks for you to actually be able to do them. It’s also helpful when reviewing your weekly or monthly plan to see where your quarterly (or 13 week) plan was too optimistic. If, for example, you’re travelling for two weeks in August, you need to make sure you didn’t account for those two weeks during your quarterly plan, because chances are you won’t be able to hit very many goals during that time.
Don’t be afraid to refactor the plan when major things happen. Your plan should be flexible enough to account for the small and medium sized surprises life throws at us (broken fridge, out of town friend unexpectedly drops by for a few days, you picked up a new hobby), but don’t be afraid to rethink your plans when the big things hit (major illness, unexpected move, promotion, job change, etc). You don’t score points for sticking to the plan – the plan is just a tool meant to help you achieve your goals.
My planning is done on paper, and then I use Fantastical (a calendar app) and Streaks on my phone to help me keep daily track of things. I look at my weekly plan almost every day, and I track things there as well. On a weekly basis I review my progress and decide what to focus on next week. If it’s a busy week I’ll select only a few relatively easy goals, for example. The point is to build a plan that is detailed enough to cover the most important areas in your life well, and yet allows for flexibility.
A small snippet from this quarter’s plan
Have you found this helpful? What tools do you use to achieve your goals?
Back in January I wrote about trying a new long term planning system that isn’t the Theme System or theme based, and isn’t yearly goal based, but rather is based on breaking the year into four 13 week blocks, each one representing a fully independent quarter.
I’m now in week 11 of the second of these blocks (quarter two, to put it more simply), and I’m starting to plan the next quarter. While working on my plan I thought that it would be useful to document the procedure, talk about my review process, and discuss how I planned the previous quarters, how things went, and what I plan to do differently in the third quarter.
The point of this system is to break the year into more manageable parts. This allows for greater flexibility in planning, time to “recover” from life’s surprises, and time to work on meaningful, long term projects. On the one hand the entire year isn’t a wash when life deals one of its blows, and on the other hand you can allow yourself to express a realistic amount of ambition.
Starting the Third Quarter’s Setup
I use the Leuchtturm Bullet Journal for my planning, and it should last me to the end of the year. After that I’ll switch to a Leuchtturm 120gsm dot grid notebook, as I don’t use any of the Bullet Journal features in my current notebook.
The first bit is a bit mindless, but I prefer to see it as meditative. Each week in my planner gets two pages, and so I leave four empty pages after the last spread of the previous quarter. These four pages will contain my plan for the quarter, broken into various sections. More on how I build that in a later post.
Then I sit down and draw out 13 weekly spreads. On the left side of the spread I write down the days of the week and the dates, and on the right I just put a “Weekly Tasks” title with the number of the week in the quarter in square brackets. I do this in one sitting for the entire quarter, and it takes about 30 minutes because I don’t rush it. This is how the pages look at this point:
This is how it looks when it’s filled and in use:
The left side gets filled with my exercise plan for the week, major appointments, and important things I don’t want to forget.
The right side has my weekly goals, both in the form of various checklists with checkboxes and more general lists. This is where my quarterly goals get put into action – every Friday or Saturday I look at my quarterly goals, and then try to advance as many of them as I can in the week. Things become more quantifiable at this point, though it’s often only in my daily to do lists that they become real, doable tasks. My daily to do list is something that I write the night before on an A5 loose sheet of paper, and recycle once I’m done with it.
Next time I’ll post a bit more about how I create the quarterly plan.
How do you plan your year? How is your planning going now that the year is halfway through?
This is probably going to be the hardest post to write in this series, and so I’ve been postponing it.
I got into Getting Things Done around 2005, when it was really starting to gain momentum with tech workers online. I first heard about it via PvP Online’s creator, Scott Kurtz. Yes, I found a productivity and planning system via one of the first webcomic creators. The internet is funny that way.
Notes from 2011 on doing GTD better
If you have no idea what GTD is, then I suggest starting here. It’s a 15 minute guide to David Allen’s all-encompassing planning and productivity system. If it resonates with you, then the GTD book is pretty good for a book in the productivity genre. Books in this genre tend to be repetitive, padded with anecdotes, and oftentimes poorly written. The GTD book is readable, and while it contains the inevitable productivity guru anecdotes, there aren’t very many of them.
There are a few things to note about GTD that set it apart from other productivity systems, and make knowing about it worthwhile:
While it was developed for a paper office based world and appears on the face of it to be very rigid, it is in fact extremely customizable and flexible, and it converts very well to digital planning and to do list systems. Many of the most popular to list applications have their roots in GTD, for good reason.
While it was developed for an office setting and busy executives, it easily works well for students, designers and other creatives, developers, teachers, and just about anybody that doesn’t lead a leisure filled life. If you have “stuff to do”, if you feel overwhelmed, then GTD in some form or another could very likely help you.
This system spawned dozens and dozens of other systems. You can see the roots of GTD in BuJo (Bullet Journalling), there’s a monster list of GTD implementations, and 43folders (Merlin Mann’s old productivity site) is full of info on various GTD tweaks and variants. This, by the way, is my favourite one.
The basics of GTD are worth implementing no matter which system you use, because they just work, and because they will likely fit whichever system you use. They are:
Make a list of all the things you have on your mind that you need to do. They need to be actions that you can perform in the real world, and you need to be able to clearly envision what “done” means.
Curate that list – make sure that things on it are actually ACTIONS that you can take IN THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE. Break big tasks into little ones, things that you are able to do it small chunks of time. Make sure there aren’t any hidden dependencies or prerequisites to these tasks. Make sure you know what DONE looks like. Make sure that they are REAL and actually need to be done, and need to be done by YOU. If things on that list take less than 2 minutes to do, just do them. T
Go over that list and do the things. If you’re stuck, make sure the thing was properly defined and isn’t a hidden project (i.e. isn’t actually one task but rather 20), something that you can delegate or not do, or something that you can’t start working on now. If you’re balking at doing it open a timer (the famous pomodoro technique enters here).
Once a week prune the list. Be ruthless.
Don’t schedule anything on your calendar unless it absolutely has to be on your calendar – a doctor’s appointment, a child’s graduation, an exam date, etc.
You can get carried away by GTD and become more interested in the organizational part of it (“Productivity Pr0n”) than in actually getting the work done.
The last bullet is what earned GTD a place in this blog post series.
I love GTD. I’ve been using it in various form for almost two decades. I have the book and have read it twice, and I have a good grasp of the major players in the GTD cinematic universe. I know the system well enough to be comfortable to get rid of its mannerisms and streamline it to my own needs. I can see its influences in Jira, in BuJo, in Omnifocus and other to do apps. And it’s very powerful dark side is that it really invites you to tweak and tinker with it. You are tempted to make your system a little bit sleeker, better, more efficient, better suited for your needs, to the point where you suddenly find yourself spending more time and care on the system than the tasks that it is supposed to help you manage. So while GTD taught me how to define and manage my tasks, it also taught me to be constantly aware of how much time I’m spending on my task management systems.
So if you are worried about being carried away by GTD’s siren call to tweak, tweak, tweak, here are some basic ideas from the system that I think are worth taking with you or thinking about no matter what:
Our minds aren’t good at keeping track of things. Write them down.
Not everything is a real task. It if it isn’t an action that you need take in the world, then it needs to be trashed/delegated/better defined.
Tasks that languish in your planner/to do system are either ill defined (see bullet above) or require deliberate action to get out of the way (see pomodoro technique, dashes and timers).
Don’t clutter your calendar. It just adds needless stress to your life.
The best definition of a task is a physical action, that can be accomplished at a sitting, supports valuable progress towards a recognized and desirable goal, and something that YOU are the most appropriate person to perform.
In the early 2010s Filofax was all the rage (much like Plotter is now), and I was swept with the trend. I started by purchasing the Personal Urban, then quickly expanded to Pocket, Personal and A5 Filofaxes of various kinds (Urban, Malden, Classic, Cuban, Graphic, Bond, Finchley and more).
A5 Malden, one of my more well used Filofaxes
What drew me (and others) to them is the infinite customizability and the fact that these were gorgeous, well-made objects made by a brand with a history and good track record. Online communities that shared photos of spreads and setups started to grow around the brand, and unlike Moleskine and Moleskinerie, the company left them to their own devices. Some of them exist to this day (like the delightful Philofaxy). The parallels with today’s boju and Plotter communities are pretty clear.
I invested in this Filofax, creating hand made labels for the tabs, setting it up just right.
The promise of bujo (bullet journalling) and the Plotter are also the promise of the Filofax: build a planner/notebook hybrid system that matches your exact needs like a glove. Filofaxes are a joy to hold in your hand: they are beautiful, tactile objects that feel good and are exquisitely well made.
Look how pretty this red Personal Malden is. You can almost feel the buttery leather through the screen.
They weren’t cheap, but if you waited patiently or were willing to buy second hand you could get some really great deals, and they lasted forever. The refills, much like Plotter ones, were the real expense. Yes, you could buy a specialized hole punch for them and create your own refills, but most people just bought them from Filofax themselves or from Filofax compatible sellers. Which refills you bought depended mostly on the purpose of the Filofax in question, and I had ones that had no planner inserts at all, only lined or blank refills and tabs.
Personal Cuban, which has a rich leather cover that I was so afraid to muss it never left the house.
The olive Personal Urban Filofax below was my first Filofax and my workhorse. I used it heavily from 2011-2013, and it was a heady nostalgia ride to dust it off and open it up again. It is very well made – fabric, pleather and ring mechanism are in perfect condition even after intense use and then years of storage. It is also a relic of a person that I lost when I went through cancer treatments, and I confess that reading over some pages made me want to cry. The things I worried about…
Personal Urban Filofax, my first and most used one.
Do you want to see how much I was into Filofaxes? I even had a page in my Filofax where I planned my Filofax usage:
So much cringe, but I choose to be kind to my old, naive self.
Some of the Filofax inserts were fountain pen friendly, but I didn’t use fountain pens with my Filofaxes at all. I used Pilot Hi-Tech-C Coleto multipens with them, and I spent a good amount of money on their refills (which would either get air bubbles and stop writing, break, or just simply run out much too quickly). I even combined my love for Filofax with my love for the Chronodex system for a while:
Pages in my Filofax that I planned to use for Chronodex entries.
So why did I stop using my Filofaxes completely? The system was well made, full of promise, and could double as a notebook and triple as a wallet, so what went wrong?
It was a combination of things that made me put all my Filofaxes into boxes for storage:
The stores in London closed down (first the Neal street one, then the one off Regent street), and it became harder to find Filofax refills in stationery shops in London (they never were available locally).
The refills weren’t cheap, and with the price of shipping added and the price of using the pens that worked best with them, it just became prohibitively expensive to use the system, particularly if you had more than one Filofax running.
The rings get in the way of writing. It’s a thing with all these systems, and whoever tells you that the rings don’t get in the way isn’t being candid. And no, you won’t be taking the refills out to write on them and then filing them back in, it’s just too inconvenient.
Filofaxes are bulky and heavy, particularly when full (and they collapse when they aren’t filled). It’s a hassle to carry them around, even if you are using them as a wallet (they a aren’t great at being wallets).
As with other planning systems – finding refills that have the week start on Sunday (because that’s when it starts here) was nearly impossible.
Hints of posts to come.
So why get into ring based systems like Filofax and Plotter? If you want one physical planner system that will function in more than one way at the same time, will allow you to customize it fully to your needs, and can be carried over from one year to the next, then these systems may be worth a try for you. I used my Filofaxes heavily during a very busy time in my life because I was able to set them up for all my needs, and particularly GTD (I’ll post about that system later on in this series).If you can work around the rings and can afford the system and the refills, the Filofax is a very well made object that may be able to help you fulfill your goals. It helped me apartment hunt, work on my degree, kickstart my running, and be a better manager at a busy and difficult time at work. I will forever have a soft spot for my Filofaxes, which is why I’ve never attempted to sell them.
Do I regret my Filofax obsession? No. Do I regret that I stopped using my Filofax planners? Also no. They were exactly what I needed at the time until they weren’t, and I believe that in the end a planning system needs to work for you, and not you for it. Something to remember whenever you are considering making a change in this area.
It was obvious that I’d discuss daily planners after I addressed weekly planners, right?
This format, in combination with some of the planning tactics that I’ll talk about in later posts, has been the one that I used the most over the years. Daily planners usually have a page per day, oftentimes with hourly notations on the side. Less commonly they have a page for planning and across from it a page for notes. Sometimes the page is divided into sections for various meeting notes, todos, etc. Daily planners tend to be the thickest of planners, unless they split the year somehow, or only cover part of it (academic year planners, for example).
This is a very old Filofax daily planner example that I had laying around. I’ll be posting separately about the Filofax system
I’ve used the daily format the most because it allows for the most room to think and plan in, and the main reason I plan on paper is for the space it allows me to sit with a pen in hand and a blank (lined/squared) page and plan the direction, location and movement of my tasks like a general ordering troops around in the army. Push this one until tomorrow or early next week, this one gets a little marker for lower priority, and this one for higher, etc. The marking methods that I use have changed a bit over the years, but the format that I prefer largely hasn’t. I can oftentimes plan two days on a page, but it makes things feel cramped. I’m giving that format a try now (two days per page), and I’m likely going to revert back to my beloved page per day format soon. Ideas need space to breath, and when tasks get cramped I tend to miss a few of them. They just run on into each other in a condensed wall of text.
Like with weekly planners, daily planners have obvious inherent downsides. They’re thick and heavy. Unless you’re making them yourself (which is what I’ve been doing for years), you’ll be made to feel bad with every day you skip in them. They also don’t allow to easily see the bigger picture: having all the space that the weekly planners lack, they pay for that with the inability of letting you get a feel for your week in a glance. You remain mired in the day to day, and need to purposefully remember to look ahead to see what’s coming tomorrow, the day after, next week.
This is the reason that for years I’ve kept two notebooks that I turned into planners, a daily one (which was much more heavily used) and a weekly one (which I referenced once or twice a week). This combination worked the best for me until I got sick and it crumbled. Perhaps it will work for me again.
As part of my struggles with planning, I’ve been reviewing the various planning systems I’ve used over the years and how they have changed. One of the most persistent of these has been the Weekly Planner.
Weekly planners generally take the form of a week on two pages, with the left page used for the actual weekly planner part and the right page used for notes. I’ve used Moleskinepocket weekly planners, I’ve used tiny weekly planners from Word Notebooks for two years (2016 and 2017), and I’ve used a large squared Moleskine notebook that I turned into a weekly planner myself. The format appeals to me, which is why I’ve had some form of a weekly planner with me for well over a decade.
The classic Moleskine weekly spread.
The pluses of the weekly format seem obvious: you can get an overview of your week at a glance without too much clutter. You can easily tell when you can block out time for things, and what is your general availability for the week. You can tell if it’s a “heavy” week or a “light” one and plan your projects accordingly, and you can schedule pre-work and prep for upcoming events. It’s the ultimate planner’s planning format.
The minuses are that you don’t have enough space to plan out the individual days, which usually necessitates a secondary planning system, and that if you live in a country that starts the week on Sunday and not on Monday (like I happen to), your choices in this category are few and hard to come by.
Yet if this format is so compelling, why did I stop keeping a dedicated weekly planner late last year?
The answer is that I wasn’t referencing it enough to justify lugging another notebook around. It was great to get a sense of the week to come as I was planning for it on Friday or Saturday, but once I finished the planning, I would reference it again maybe once or twice a week. That was just not good enough.
My solution for now is to use one of the “Stay on Target” notepads from The Well Appointed Desk‘s Etsy store to create a small weekly plan on one piece of paper that I can see at all times (I keep the pad propped up at my desk). It just has one or two major events for each day tops, and it helps me keep track of my long term goals on a weekly basis (running, blogging, sketching, reading, gym and NTC sessions, meditation sessions, vitamins and fountain pens written dry). Here’s a censored example of next week’s plan:
Like the rest of my planning, it’s messy, not Instagram ready and not festooned with calligraphy, but it’s mine and it’s useful. My handwriting these cold days is beyond appalling, but as I can barely feel my hands even as I laboriously type this out, it’s the best that I can do under the circumstances, and I understand what I’m writing so that’s good enough.
And that is the main takeaway from this entire series (there are a few more posts to come): find what works for you, and don’t create a system that makes you work for it.
I last posted about my planner and to do list setup here. To recap, my planning system includes two large Moleskine hard cover squared notebooks, one in which I plan my week, and one in which I use as a daily to do planner. I started using this setup once Covid hit and I started working from home. It worked very well for a year and a half.
I was hospitalized for a month, in which I discovered that I have zero control over my time or how my day will shape out. When I got out I was already on a Chemo regiment. I had to make adjustments to my life, this time because of my personal health, not a global pandemic.
Score (another) one for self-made planners.
My old system was generic enough that it fit into my new lifestyle with very little adjustment. The weekly notebook stayed mostly the same, as you can see below. The main difference is that I manage less stuff there and more using reminders in Fantastical. It’s not that I don’t like paper planners any more, it’s just that Chemo Brain is a possible side effect of my treatment and I don’t want to risk not getting something important done because I forgot to check my weekly planner at the right moment, or I saw something there but didn’t remember it after I’ve seen it.
So why keep the weekly planner at all? Because it helps me see how the week is shaping up, and because it allows me to do a little long term planning, despite everything. All my plans at the moment are in two week batches (dictated by my chemo regiment), and this layout allows me to manage them.
Another addition to this notebook is a few tracker pages, marked by tabs. Some track purchases that I’m waiting for, some track bureaucracies that I need to take care of, others list things that I want to get done eventually but I haven’t decided yet when or how.
As for my daily planner notebook, I just finished one and started another. Here’s the finished notebook:
Moleskine Large Hardcover squared with a Star Wars The Last Jedi decal on the cover.
Here’s the new notebook. I love using these decals to make these notebooks my own:
Moleskine Large Hardcover squared with a Star Wars Chewbacca decal on the cover.
I used to manage every day on a full spread, with personal to dos on one side of the page and professional ones on a another. Since my life is less busy now than it used to be, I’ve downsized my to do to one page per day, with personal and professional mixed in (I work from home). This is a sample of my least busiest day: it’s a chemo day and I wasn’t planning on working after this treatment since it was a long one. Door to door I was in the hospital from 6:40 to 14:00, and completely wiped out after it. I don’t usually list my meals or naps in my notebook, but chemo days are so crazy (in terms of what my brain does on steroids) that I have to write everything down. Things that I didn’t do get a strike in them and are moved forward to another day.
Everybody has different needs from their planner, and those needs oftentimes change unexpectedly, and out of sync with “planner season”. It’s one of the reasons why I find making your own planner, working just a few days or a week or two ahead is the best and most consistent way for me to manage my time. There are some great planning systems out there, but if you’ve struggled with using them, or if your circumstances make you need a very flexible system, I highly recommend picking up a squared or lined notebook and creating your own.
Writing at Large 