Printing Planners
Tuesday, February 28, 2023
Earlier this month I had a lot of little todos piling up and a bunch of deadlines approaching. Historically I haven't been the most organized when it comes to personal tasking, and I could see this problem rearing it's ugly head again with the oncoming deluge of things-to-doTM .
I've always kept a notebook lying around so I started trying to list everything I knew I needed to tackle in it so I would be less likely to forget them all. While it worked, I found my notes went from an assortment of doodles and random thoughts to nothing but bulleted lists. While it was good I was getting shit done, I kinda wanted my notebook to be a bit more flexible in it's use. So, I decided to look into picking up a planner. I wanted something with the following:
- A calendar
- A timeline of things happening in the day-to-day
- Space for all my TODOs for the day
- Extra space for random notes/journaling/etc.
While I'm sure there's plenty of existing planners that offer all that, I ended up giving up searching for an existing solution and designed one myself as an exercise.
It's been a while since I made anything zine-like, so this was a fun excuse to boot Scribus back up and put a little thing together. I made sure to design it so that I can print one on demand and use it for any month of any year (assuming the modern calendar doesn't change in size anytime soon). Leaving fields blank for year, month, dates, allows me to print as many pages as I might need for a month, fill out the fields by hand, and be good to go for the month.
After using one for most of February, I found it to be fairly helpful. As with any new routine, you only get as much out of it as you put into it. When I was regularly blocking out my days it proved (for the most part) incredibly helpful in keeping me on track and accomplishing my goals. When I didn't take the time to fill it out, though, I definitely decreased in productivity/focus. Still, I think it was worthwhile enough for me to print one off for March. I even tried to saddle stich it, since the staples in my February planner didn't quite hold out. It's an ugly first attempt, but if it works out better I'll be doing that every month going forward.
If you're interested in printing your own, you can find the cover and insert PDFs below. I print the cover single-sided on card stock, then print all but the outermost insert page on both sides to ensure each day has room for blocked-out time elements on the left and todos/notes on the right for each day.