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Setting Up a New Planner So You Still Use It in March
Planners are abandoned in February, not December. The cause is almost always that the system was too elaborate to maintain during a busy week. Setting up for the worst week rather than the best one is the whole trick.
Start with the fixed points
Before anything else, write in what is already true for the year: birthdays, anniversaries, renewal dates, term dates, regular commitments, known holidays.
This takes half an hour and it is the highest-value half hour you will spend, because these are the things forgotten most often and they are all knowable now.
Then the recurring rhythm
Mark the things that repeat: a weekly meeting, a monthly invoice, a quarterly review. Rather than writing them fifty times, mark them on the monthly spreads and let the weekly spread pick them up as you go.
Keep the system small
The commonest failure mode is a system with six colours, four symbols and three trackers. It works for two weeks. Then a busy week arrives, the system is not maintained, and the gap makes it feel broken.
A system that survives has:
- One way to mark a task
- One way to mark it done
- One way to mark something moved to another day
That is enough. Add more only after three months of the simple version working.
If you use colour
Two colours maximum, and give them a meaning you can state in a sentence. “Blue is work, black is everything else” is maintainable. A six-colour scheme requires the right pen to hand at the moment of writing, which is the point it fails.
Decide where undated things go
Every planner accumulates things without a date — ideas, shopping lists, things to look up. If there is no home for them, they land on whichever day you happened to be on, and that day becomes unreadable.
Use the notes pages if the planner has them. If not, keep the last few pages blank for this purpose and note it on the first page.
The weekly review is the habit that matters
Fifteen minutes, same time each week. Three questions:
- What did not get done, and does it still need to?
- What is coming next week that needs preparation now?
- Is anything on the monthly view I have forgotten?
This is what makes a planner a planning tool rather than a diary. Without it, a planner records what happened; with it, the planner changes what happens.
Migration, and permission to drop things
When a task moves week after week, that is information. Either it matters and should be scheduled properly, or it does not and should be crossed out.
Crossing something out without doing it is a legitimate outcome. A planner full of guilt-inducing undone items gets closed.
The first page
Write your name and a contact detail. Planners get left in cafes and meeting rooms, and a planner with a phone number on page one usually comes back.
If you fall behind
Do not go back and fill in the missing weeks. Open it at today and carry on. The blank fortnight is not a failure of the system; treating it as one is what ends the habit.
Choosing for the setup you want
If you plan to keep undated notes, buy a planner with notes pages. If you want a weekly review, you want a monthly spread as well as weekly ones. The format decision follows the method, not the other way round.
Browse Weekly & Monthly Planners for layouts with notes pages.
