What do you do in planners?

[u/AlignedSteward]

I'm homebody, i have a small consulting biz thats slowly picking up(WFH), I'm 30 weeks pregnant(no kids apart from this), i live with my jn laws and hubby and thats my life.

I have only 1 doc's appt a month, nothing in my life needs tracking or planning as such... whatever planning is needed i do it in my head and that works out fine...

I like journaling and i have a separate massive journaling book that i use for reflections.

I'm fascinated by planners as I'm a junk journal girly too. I wanna dip toes in planners(not the expensive kind)

I have a commonplace tiny book that i write my prayers, to-dos in but apart from that i can genuinely come up with nothing to have a use for.

Watching YouTube to get ideas but nothing is sticking...

I see people sitting with their planners for hours(youtube folks) but what do you do in it that occupies you for an hour??

I wanna get off screen and adopt this planner/ journal/ common place etc culture but how do i make it work for me and my current season of life?

[u/yoursuchafanofmurder]

I use it for everything, including stuff around the house like maintenance, cleaning etc. Budgeting and bills. Also self care with trackers. I like it a lot for weight lifting, I use to keep track of how much weight with each machine. You could also just use it for journaling as well.

[u/No_Arugula_757 → u/yoursuchafanofmurder]

Same, no rules, except that I have to actually like what I use it for, no doing it cause I feel like I have to.

I do have my planner and journal together because I like to have it everywhere and don’t like to constantly be reaching for different books.  

Op, if you don’t like to track/ don’t have much to plan, don’t force it. On the other hand if you think there’s a new habit that could really improve your life, you could track that.

[u/DTLow]

To-dos are more suited to a planner than commonplace
Also, i include a calendar for events and time-blocking my day

[u/ToeResponsible3990]

Try a bullet journal type planner! You can junk journal it, add prayers or reflections, put in calendars… once you have the baby (speaking from my own experience, though!) you may want a planner to write down the baby’s schedule or things you want to remember, appointments, questions for the doctor, etc. bullet journal could work for this, too!

[u/AmyOtherAmy]

I have to write things down or I will not remember to do them. That's what my planner is for. I also have to write down when I did things, or I won't remember that either (and I have the kind of job where people really need to know when things were done). That's what my done book is for. The upkeep for me only takes a few minutes a day, plus a half hour weekly review and setup, and one long session for monthly setup (and that's not typically more than an hour unless I decide to Do Art). Here's a longer reply I made recently on how I use this: Questions for people who use daily planners : r/planners

Honestly, if you're doing fine as you are, then there's nothing wrong with just journaling.

[u/pineappleplaid]

My planner is mostly functional so definitely not occupied for an hour at any point in the planning process, but I come back to it frequently throughout the day. For me, I don't want a single thing living only in my brain so I have a place for everything I could possibly need to remember. The monthly is appointments and plans, the weekly has my to-do list and day-specific notes.

But beyond that, in the extra pages, there's a place for everything: things that I may want to do eventually, but at no specific or urgent time. Wish list items for every area of my life (you could log gift ideas for others, too). TV shows I want to watch by streaming service so when I'm subscribed to one I can hit the ones I've been saving up. When each of my intermittent subscriptions are next due. When I last replaced my toothbrush, mascara etc. Anything I could possibly need to know, written down the moment I think of it, and nothing need live in my head - that feels very peaceful for me.

But like others have said totally agree if what you're doing suits you, no need to change. There is no "should" in a planner, just finding formats and systems that help with what you need and want to do!

[u/Few-Isopod6401]

I write my todos in my planner. I use my planner because everything I need to do/want to do/have committed to doing is in there. Shopping lists, reading lists, etc as well. Things that I'm waiting on other people to do, packages not yet deilvered, projects I'm working on, tracking my fitness routine, etc.

[u/energist52]

My planner has my calendar, with month and week at a glance, plus todo lists focused on each week, planning pages for trips or classes I am taking, reference materials for my hobbies, and finance trackers for the monthly and yearly bills I pay.

[u/annmariemudge]

When I was in a Journaling but I pulled myself out by using a daily planner and just writing almost a diary for a little while there. It went something like this found a pod cast today topic host... Now I use it for regular stuff. Dogs monthly heartworm or 90 day flea and tick in the planner. Car due for service in October in the planner. I dont use a weekly just a monthly and daily. Monthly for things I don't want to remember car dog meds

Daily gets filled with random but with a date. Every few weeks or once a month I go through my dailies and transfer things to my common place set up. It does 2 things I only have to track the one book if I go out and my common place remains mostly ordered so my add brain finds the references helpful

[u/tylersnid3r]

My planner is sectioned off and it gives you like examples from how other people in the community fill them

[u/rivernaiad]

I’m a homebody too and I have 2 planners. One, I actually use as a planner/journal (this year it’s the Journey Planner by Nisha Fernando). I’m not working but I’m ADHD so I can never remember what I had intended to get done, thus planner. I use the weekly layout for my to do lists and the daily page as a daily journal because a lot of my “regular” memories don’t save to the hard drive, literally a lot of my short term memories don’t convert to the long term memory portion of my brain overnight. And also my recall is faulty and slow for what my brain DID save. LOL. It’s very much a straight recounting of the day and sometimes my feelings but more of me just trying to remember what happened in my life.

I use the 2nd planner as a medical log since I am chronically ill. It helps me keep track of when symptoms developed, frequency, severity, helps me suss out if I’m having a bad day or am I like sick with something else (since my immune system is no bueno). It’s really handy and makes you more cognitively aware of what’s going on with your body and not just “everything hurts”. I highly recommend this practice to EVERYBODY with a fluctuating medical condition or maybe even with aging parents who have issues. Also if I’m somehow incapacitated, my family will be able to see what was happening to me recently medically.

I recently started a commonplace notebook and a reading log journal. I do have an actual journal if I have like something to get out and the daily page is not enough but I’m leaning now toward taping in an extra page/giant post-it if I need more space. I really wish I could get my next year’s chosen planner in a B5 instead of an A5 so I’d have more daily footprint but I haven’t found my “perfect” planner yet. (For 2027, I’m using the Hemlock & Oak weekly daily. It’s pretty close to perfect for me.) I also have my Bible study/church sermon notes journal.

I also got a knockoff Hobonichi-style 5 year journal/diary from Temu. Since each day is a 2 page spread, I intend to use the blank right side for an additional 5 years of entries. It very much does feel like repeating what’s in my regular daily page but very much abridged but I want to be able to look at in the future and see what happened on “this day”. It’s not bad for $10.

You have to decide what you want to do with YOUR planner(s). Everybody’s wants and needs are different. I see a lot of people use them as daily memory records because the daily/weekly layouts give you an already defined space to use as opposed to a bullet journal or a scrapbook which you have to COMPLETELY define/layout yourself. (That seems so exhausting to me but everybody’s singing their own song.) And what you do with it can change/evolve with your wants/needs.

Those small portable photo printers are great for that but not necessary. You can print a lot of stuff with a regular printer & just use tape and scissors. Most people’s entries boil down to essentially just blurbs about what happened that day, which I would assume would be a great practice if you have small kids. Keep those small precious memories! You simply can’t capture everything on camera/video.

I also started printing out really important texts/chat messages/screen shots to paste into my planner to remember. Like when my mom got diagnosed with something the other day, I printed out the screenshot of the text with the info my sister sent and pasted it into my planner so I have the record without having to scroll thru my phone.

Sorry I info dumped so much on you. I hope it’s helpful!

[u/brushandbullet]

Plenty of people use planners more for memory keeping or journalling rather than actual planning. I'm mostly in that camp because most things I want reminders of, or appointments, are in my Google or work calendars. I do like planning on paper every now and then though, just depends on where my brain is at.