• Planning,  Productivity

    How I Do Longer-Term Planning

    Daily and weekly planning will get you through the day-to-day without having tasks pile up for a massive weekend task-fest. But isn't there more to life than just the day-to-day? For a long time I existed on daily and weekly planning only. Partially it was because I was just so busy juggling all of my commitments (work, child, house, spouse and volunteer) that I didn't have room for anything more. I would plow through my days, insanely productive, falling into bed at night exhausted. But there was never anything more. The novel I wanted to write remained a remote dream, and my craft closet morphed into a craft room with supplies for unstarted projects. Partially it was because I was completely flummoxed by the thought of thinking of a 5- or 10-year plan. I couldn't even see the end of the week for the enormous pile of…

  • Planning,  Productivity

    How I Do Daily Planning

    Doing a weekly plan (see How I Do Weekly Planning) is a great way to frame your tasks in your schedule. But it isn't enough, because you need to be able to figure out what you will do on any given day. Today we will look at how I do my daily planning, based on my weekly plan. As I have shared before, I learned how to do daily planning when I purchased my first planner. It was a two page per day spread, with a time grid on one side, and a list for tasks on the other. Every day, I would fill in my schedule, then list the tasks I wanted to get done that day. If I didn't get them done, I rewrote them onto the next day, adding new tasks. Regardless of what my schedule looked like. Since I was a full-time engineering…

  • Planning,  Productivity

    How I Do Weekly Planning

    I do three different types of planning in order to keep myself on track and productive: daily, weekly and long-term. This month we will be looking at all three. We'll start with what I consider the most important for my productivity: the weekly plan. When I first purchased my first planner, I didn't know anything about planning. And the system didn't educate me either. I had a 2 page per day Daytimer, and the instructions were just about how to plan a day. I was in college at the time, and I could never figure out how I always had so much left to do at the end of each day! The problem for me, as most people I have talked to, is that the schedule is not constant. Some days are busier than others. And yet we never step back and take that into account. Getting…

  • Planning,  Tools

    Making a Dream Board with Canva

    It has been said that a picture is worth 1,000 words. Since we can distill complex thoughts into single images, it makes sense that we can use images to represent our desires. Dream boards, which are collections of things you want, are a collage of images and words that we can look at to remind us of what we are seeking. Today we will learn how to make a dream board with Canva.

  • Planning

    30 Day Challenge: Planning The Night Before Wrap-up

    I realized I was having difficulty sticking to my task list...because I had never made a plan. The Planning The Night Before challenge was to get me past that difficulty. The challenge was to make my plan for the next day in my bullet journal the night before. The thought was that even having written list - even if I didn't look at it again until late in the next day - would help keep me on track.

  • Planning

    30 Day Challenge: Planning The Night Before

    I had thought to tackle something major this month, but honestly, I need something that is going to help me stay on track rather than something that is going to shake the foundations. And for that reason, I have decided that this month's 30 day challenge is going to be to plan the night before. I've noticed that when I have a plan when I get up, I get more done that day. It doesn't seem to matter if I actually look at the plan first thing or not. It doesn't even seem to matter if I don't look at it until lunch. But having that plan already set means I will get it done, because somewhere my brain recognizes that it's been done.

  • Planning,  Productivity

    My Bullet Journal Setup

    Bullet journaling, at its core, is a simple system with no frills. Simple text notations; no fancy graphics or headers. However, one quick search on Pinterest will show you hundreds of fantastic expansions - and complications - of the original system. It's always put me off, because I have trouble drawing a straight line with a ruler. It put me off so much that I never really gave the simple system at its core a try. For the past two years I have tried to plan on my iPad. I bought a PDF planner and used that as a basis, adding in a formatted page for each day. But the system wasn't working for me, and I experienced planner blindness. Planner blindness is a fancy way of saying I started ignoring the planner. So after setting up a system (again, that didn't work for me) for 2019…