Been Away, But Now I’m Back

I had already been thinking about writing a blog post when I saw @druinok’s new post as well as someone else’s in the last few days.  My first reason for writing a new post is that I also made a new planner for this year.

For the last few years, my planner has consisted of two parts:  a disc-bound notebook with a laminated cover that holds my calendars, class rolls, and gradebook, and a half-size spiral notebook for everything else. 

This has worked out really well for me, because the notebook lets me make overall plans, and the spiral is where I keep my notes on everything: to-do lists, notes from meetings, financial stuff about my mother (I’m her trustee), project lists, etc.  A couple of years ago, I got even more organized and made a table of contents page and started dating and numbering the pages.

I really liked this system, but this summer I started wondering if I couldn’t tweak it a little.  I still love my notebook, but maybe I could improve on the half-size spiral. My practice has been to make a to-do list each Monday, broken out by subject.  This meant I was writing the same headings every week.  It occurred to me that if I went with a half-size disc notebook, I could buy blank filler pages and print out my to-do pages, which could be inserted where I needed them.  Furthermore, I could incorporate one of my goals for this year, which is to have a Bible verse each week to meditate on. Because I’m me, I created a spreadsheet of some favorite verses in Excel and used mail-merge in Word to generate the pages.  Here’s the completed product:

(The cover picture is one I took on my trip this summer to Port Aransas, Texas.)

So far, this has worked out really well, especially being able to rearrange pages. I was even able to make a pocket out of construction paper!

If anyone’s reading this and wants the template, let me know.