- A lot of planners on the market have horizontal (?) spreads where the days are stacked on top of each other rather than side-by-side. I really appreciate a layout that matches roughly how I visualize a week, somewhat like a week that has been cut out of a monthly calendar.
- Admittedly, I'm a huge opponent of monthly calendars beginning with Mondays. However, for a weekly spread, this is working out just fine. The Saturday and Sunday of the same weekend being on the same page works out nicely, and splitting the last column allows six columns to divide nicely onto two pages.
- The vertical layout also is a good shape if I want to think of each day from morning to night. I can interweave appointments and todo items roughly when they occur (or might best occur) during the day. (This is the concept of the "Stubby Todo List"--a short todo list of the things you actually need to complete in that day, as opposed to the infinite running todo list that is never completed; it's advised to write this in chronological order.) I don't number all the hours, but if something happens in the evening, I'll write it and the time at the bottom of the rectangle; something around noon goes in the middle.
- Which brings me to the "todo" section. This is where I put todo items that don't have to be completed on a certain day, but probably that week. If it doesn't need to get done on that week, I might put that task on my monthly task list, to migrate to the appropriate week or day later.
- "Notes" is for random stuff/planning/doodles.
- The four sections to the right of "notes" is something I invented when I came up with this spread. Right now it's serving as a landing place for special projects. For example, I'm trying to blog more often, so if I come up with a blog topic, I'll write it in one of the big squares, and when I post it, I check it off. Or if I want to work on decluttering the garage for 15 minutes I'll write that in one of the squares. Any bigger project that has multiple steps goes in here. I aim to create bite-sized pieces of projects that will move the needle on the goals in my life.
- (I had a week when I knew life would be really out of routine, so I filled in those squares with gentle self-care habits that I knew would help keep me sane. By intentionally listing stuff there, I wouldn't be able to write in unrealistic projects that would lead me to feeling disappointed in myself for not accomplishing them. Literally, I made the squares: (1) Queer Eye, (2) be kind to yourself, (3) order take out, (4) FaceTime a friend this week.
Like I've said before, this is totally new to me. For years (14 to be exact), I've used a basic Moleskine (or Moleskine-esque) notebook to just list All. My. Todos/ideas. in a running list. I did the stuff in whatever order and then migrated the uncompleted tasks to the next page whenever I turned the page. I appreciated that I never lost an idea and also that it gave me the freedom to do things when my brain wanted to do them.
It clearly worked for many seasons, and there probably will be more seasons to come when I will go back to it. (In fact, I imagine in the summer when life and time is more fluid, I probably will go back to that format.) But for right now, this is meeting a need. It's helping me manage my days and weeks to make sure I don't have too much or too little on any given day.
I'm going on Week 6 (longest I've kept up a weekly spread before), so we'll see! For now, I'm celebrating something that is working for me.
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