Changing Things Up In The Way I Plan

Planning Is A Learning Process

Photo by Covene on Unsplash

So, now we are moving into week three of August. 

It is official: I hate the way I set up my planner for this month.

Four pages per day, it sounds good in theory, but in reality…it bites.  Having the tracker pages in the back of the book…that means I don’t see them and I don’t think about them.  I don’t think I have actually made the effort to use them since week one of August.

Truthfully, even with all the collaging I am doing and everything in my current planner, I am quite frustrated.  I do want to stress that I am loving adding the collage. I love the way the glue, as I am using a basic school glue to paste things in, it crinkles up the pages and gives the paper a texture that was missing.

I will also admit that the paper in this journal, while it is a 120 GSM, isn’t that nice thick heavy paper I have grown accustomed to in my other journals where the paper is between 140 and 160 GSM. So that added texture from the wet glue has been a bonus for me.

Right now, in my planner, I feel as if I am doing nothing more than basic memory keeping in it…while I wait for September so that I can revert to my former style. It is a bit like swimming in the middle of the ocean and treading water, waiting for help to come.

Now, what I am planning to do for September…video coming at some point, yes, is go back to my one day on two pages.  But I am also planning to move some of my tracking back to that daily spread—although I still need to make sure I have room to put my to-do list for each day as well.

This past weekend, I had a day all alone as I was avoiding the weather as the heat and I are not pals in any way, especially lately.  My guys went out and were gone all day.  I stayed home and had a field day cleaning and re-organizing things.  Yes, I have to have them both out of the house so I can fill bags for donation and to re-arrange some things.  I have a variety of reasons for this.  We can get into that later.

While I was folding laundry, I put on YouTube to listen to more than anything.  I ended up watching this playlist by Jashii Corrin:

Mental Health Bullet Journal Ideas

I finished the laundry and sat watching through this playlist.  I took notes.  I took lots of notes.

I am planning to implement several of the things I learned from these videos into my planning going forward.  I am not planning to throw in every single good idea that caught my interest, but I am planning to see what resonates and test a few things out.

I didn’t realize that if I don’t plan in time for self-care, then I keep pushing it aside and pushing it aside.  I have too many other things to do.  I have to get my to-do list done.  By the time I finish working through my to-do list for the day, if there is no self-care mentioned in my planners or journal, then it doesn’t come up for me. Which means I don’t do it. Out of sight, out of mind clearly applies to me all too well.

I have to fix that.

Plus, I have learned some new tactics to track my pain levels, my energy levels, and my symptoms on a daily basis.  Several of those spreads I will be incorporating into my monthly planner moving forward. I am going to be playing with these concepts until I hit upon what works best for me.

Prior to this, I basically checked in once a day on how I am feeling. I left it that open as well, so not a lot of information was going into my planners to track that. I won’t even get into why I want to track that to present to a doctor here in the United States—if you hear ‘medical/doctor’ and ‘United States’, that should give you a good idea of why tracking is a necessary thing other than for helping myself identify triggers and whatever else I need to track.

I am also going back to an idea I started but never finished pulling together and creating.  It might be called a long-term collections journal or maybe a reference journal.  When I started to put together my first reference journal, I allowed myself to get too overwhelmed with “what had to go into the journal” and although there is a lot of information in the first reference journal I started, it’s not as well-organized as I would like.  Nor is it full of the information that I need on a regular basis.

So, for the one I am in the process of planning, I am keeping a list of what I actually want and need for me in a reference journal.  Several of the spreads for self-care and mental health are spreads I want and need to include in this journal.

Here's the thing though: I don’t plan to utilize the spreads as I put them into the reference journal.  This is where I plan to put spreads that I need so that when the need for the spread pops up, there it is in my book.  I can transfer that spread style into my current journal and use them without having to struggle to figure out where I saw that spread and when.

This video by Clair Smyth has two spreads I must have:

Impulse spending tracker and the impulse eating tracker.

These are two big issues that I have and that I have had for years that sometimes I have no real issues with, but overall, especially the food thing, I have real issues with.

Luckily with the spending, I do not use credit cards to satisfy that urge, so that is one thing I don’t have to worry about. But that doesn’t stop me from grabbing a pack of stickers for my planners or a book for my kid when emotions hit.

But it is something it never occurred to me to track to figure out the whys of what is going on and then stop it in its tracks based on that information. 

Typically, I don’t notice that I am in either of those headspaces until 1 after I spend money on something or 2 I’m already chewing away on something that I shouldn’t be.  With all my digestive issues (sucrose intolerant… and fructose intolerant… and chemical intolerant—every meal is an issue.  Who am I kidding?  Every bite of food is an issue. But again, this is a story for another time.)

These are the sort of trackers I need and that I need to use consistently.

The whole mental health list that Jashii provided has given me a lot of ideas.  I hope it helps you and gives you a ton of ideas that you want to try out in your planners as well.

Need to read more?

Throughout the month of August, I will be posting five days a week on my personal blog here.

Throughout the month of August, I will also be posting five days a week on my Medium account as well.

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