I am ridiculous about notebooks. I have so many that I could start my own stationery store – as long as people would buy notebooks that either have a few pages used in them, just a few pages left OR that are too pretty to use.
I think the notebook thing goes with the writer gene but I had the notebook tendencies for long before I realized that I was a writer*. That long term affection for notebooks makes it super-odd that I have spent so much time trying to make digital methods of planning work for me.
Notebooks, pen, lipgloss, timer, candle.
It’s the stuff I need to get stuff done.
I love the *idea* that my tasks can be easily shifted and that I can plan on a huge scale but, in practice, when I get overwhelmed, I avoid turning on the computer. Sooooo, that leads to me not having my to do list in front of me and that leads to me not doing it.
I have trying to use a bullet journal for a while now but I find that I don’t really like having the various scales of planning (big life stuff, yearly, monthly, weekly & daily) all jumbled in together. Soooo, in a move utterly uncharacteristic of me, I have bent the rules a bit**
Here’s the system I am working right now.
The open notebook with my name on it is my bullet journal – that’s got big picture stuff in there. The fancy notebook in the middle has brainstorming and meeting notes in it. The black one, which is going to be decorated with metallic markers after this weekend, is a calendar with a day for each page. I am currently using that as a daily to do list but I am hoping to turn it into a bit of a daily log as things go on.
I also have a Trello account so I can keep track of individual projects in a way that I can easily replicate for repeated things. And I put links to articles I want to read in Google Keep.
The benefit of all of these notebooks (and Trello) is that I have a space to put each type of information so I don’t worry about losing track of things and I have a record of stuff that I did.
The downside is that my purse is rather full!
* I mean, I always knew that I could write, I just never thought of myself as a WRITER.
** Even though I generally march to my own drummer, I have always struggled with systems because I (unconsciously) thought that a system would only work if you did it all EXACTLY right, me bending the rules about things like bullet journalling is HUGE and a credit to my ADD meds. 😉