2016 Planner

I am a very good planner. I love sitting down, writing out a plan, making checklists and adding timelines, highlighting and crossing things out. That said I may not be the best do-er. Which is kind of ironic. I aspire to be though! My partner will tell you I set unreasonable expectations for myself and my to do lists. I want to do it all RIGHT NOW! Mainly to get the satisfaction of crossing it out on ye old to do list...

I mention this because we've reached my favorite time of the year: planner season! October seems to be the time of year when all of the great new planner and planner products debut. This is just one of the many reasons why October is my favorite month of the year! But I digress...

Last week, I put together half of my 2016 planner system, using a combination of 2015 & 2016 Simple Scrapper planner pages. I totally mixed it up from last year though, and decided I'd try out the larger 8 1/2 x 11 format.

I spend $0 on this planner because I just used office supplies I had hanging around. An old kraft 1in. binder, divided tabbed page protectors and patterned papers from my stash [Two from the Mix Tape Scrapbook Circle kit, Pink Paislee Memorandum Cubicle & Journal Paper, Fancy Pants Office Suite Creative Agenda (fitting!)]

I divided this planner into 5 sections: Calendar, Planning, Lists, Creative Team & Worksheets.

Here's a peak at my Calendar. It's a mix of blog schedule, creative team deadlines, events and upcoming travel. I use a simple black and white paperclip as the marker to find this page.

I do a bit of embellishing but not very much: a few stamps and some washi. Simple simple! Here are the stamp sets I own: SC Agenda Class Set, Kelly Purkey Check it Off, Kelly Purkey Planners gonna Plan, Kelly Purkey Planner Icons. I will say this last set is my least favorite. I can never get a clean stamped image!

Here's a list of stamp sets I want to add to my collection: [Waffle Flower Calendar Stamp, Neat & Tangled Blog Planner, Clearly Kelly Travel Planner, Clearly Kelly Special Occasion Planner]

The Planner section is made up of lots of Simple Scrapper planner pages. This one below is actually from the 2015 set of pages. But I love it so much and use it so often, I printed it for my 2016 planner as well.

You really can't see it in this photo below, but any pages that are meant to be blank, I've printed out a grid (included in the Simple Scrapper pack) to take any additional notes.

The Lists tab includes all of the projects I want to start or finish, the story ideas I have, class that are in progress and key takeaways from various classes or podcasts, etc. (All included in the Simple Scrapper planner pages)

The last two tabs helped me gather up all of my reference materials, like the Simple Scrapper Story Starters I use every month as a Creative Team member. 

The Worksheets section is also where I keep all of the fantastic handouts Jennifer Wilson creates. The one featured below is the Story Discovery worksheet. You can download it for free here.

I'm digging the easy breezy approach this year. If this doesn't work for me, I'll feel 0 guilt as I spent $0 on this project. I wanted to try something different and I'm glad I'm doing this in a low risk way.

But as I briefly mentioned earlier, this is only half of my approach. You'll notice aside from the over arching calendar, that there isn't a daily or weekly to do list. That's because I'm going to try out Bullet Journaling. I've tried so many printables and notebooks and just haven't found something that has worked for me. It's almost like I need to change things up...almost weekly, and with bullet journaling, I think I'll be able to do that!

I'm working all of this out now but will be sure to post an update on this method in the coming months. For now, I'm just happy to have this much sorted. I love how it's working out!

cheers & besos,