Panda Planner

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I forgot my planner again today. I swear I had it in my hand when I was leaving so I must have had it at some point, but it didn’t make it into work with me. It’s okay, I can function without it, but I honestly do better and am more productive if I fill out the day in the planner before I really dive into my day. I think I used to wonder what was the point in spending time writing down what you were going to do for the day. Isn’t more productive to just start working? But I’ve found that using the planner to sort out what’s really important for the day and the upcoming days really does help me.

The planner I have is a “Panda Planner” that I bought through Amazon after much deliberation. I was afraid that I wouldn’t like the fact that you have to fill in all the dates yourself, but as it turns out, I actually like that because I’ll get to use it longer. I’m not one to use it much when I’m off work--maybe a day or two here or there and I always mark stuff on the monthly calendar. I’m still working on being consistent with the weekly updates. They’re really great too--all about your successes and what can be improved and what kinds of things you’re going to have in mind for the week ahead. Seriously, I love the planner. Which is probably why I’ve been more consistent about using it than I have been with any other planner or calendar I’ve ever owned even if I haven’t been a perfect user. One of the things I like about it is how it incorporates “positive thinking” into the planning. It’s not like it’s preaching to you or anything, but on the “daily” pages it has a place for you to write three things your thankful for and three things you’re looking forward to and there are notes on the monthly parts that ask you what your main goals will be and what distractions you need to be sure to avoid. Stuff like that. It’s really, really helpful. It’s clarifying and it helps focus my mind and my intentions better.

I had good intentions for the day and it isn’t that I got “nothing” done, it’s just that my focus was not where I had originally planned. Now I’ve got a hugely busy week coming up and I need a rough draft of my teen blog post by Wednesday and I have no idea what I’m going to do on Wednesday for the podcast thing. And then there’s the week after which makes me want to come down with the flu for a week so that I don’t have to deal with any of it. If I was sick, they wouldn’t let me go to the old people’s home, right? It’s all going to be fine. I have faith that it will all work out in the end. I have to or I’ll just be a mess. The thing is, I tend to make it just under the deadline for all the things I need to do and because I’ve pretty much always made it “in the nick of time” which means there hasn’t been a clear reason to change my behavior. Well, except maybe the unnecessary extra stress that comes along with having a giant to-do list and a swiftly approaching deadline.

Sometimes I think the stress and (usually) lack of sleep that happens in those final hours before a due date should be enough of a deterrent that I start making changes. I have been somewhat better lately. There’s still a lot that I have a tendency to put off, but it’s not as bad as it used to be. For example, I had my application for Grad school done more than a month in advance and all my paperwork, etcetera, and even though they didn’t initially get my transcript and I had to do that a couple of weeks after my original submit date, I still had everything in several weeks before the date that all the pieces were due. That’s a pretty major accomplishment by me. And it was pretty much thanks go working with the planner. I’ve been using it a couple of months now and even though my consistency isn’t perfect (or great in general), I’m still seeing helpful results. I’m hopeful that the more I use it, the better the results will be and the better I’ll be about using it consistently.

I was thinking about how not using it on weekends I’m doing anything or holidays or whatever would save me pages and thereby draw out the length of time that I use it (since I number the pages, there’s no reason I can’t just decide not to give certain days a page—that’s how I’ve been operating. But now I wonder if maybe even though I won’t really be making a schedule or posting about specific tasks for the day, that I should still use a page in the planner for the thankful lists and the excited lists and the “accomplishments” list. If I’m using it everyday, even when it’s not necessary, I may have an easier time remembering to use it consistently.

I want to write more, but I literally can’t keep my eyes open