Getting the Most Out of Your Planner

It’s a good habit to get into using your planner, but it can often amount to nothing unless it is put to good, efficient use. Your daily or monthly planner is a tool, and like any tool there is a right and a wrong way to make use of it.

Right off the bat, a planner’s purpose is to add organization and forethought to your life. You’ve got your work and fun all planned out and will spare yourself from soul crushing last minute deadline rushes and having to cancel plans if you do it well. Of course, in order to make good use of your plan you need to use it as regularly as possible.

Every day you should look at and digest what you have planned for that day and the following day, to get your mind refreshed and ready for the work ahead. Along with that, each week you should have a day where you will spend the time working out your weekly plan. It’s your planning day. And it might not even take that long depending on how much you have on your agenda. Adopting this sort of regularity helps you get used to living by the planner and really adopting the lifestyle.

Another important thing is to use your planner for literally everything. Your planner is your life, it’s not your meal plan, it’s your everything plan. The more you can utilize your planner for, the better you are making use of the tool. Of course, don’t burden yourself with pushing to fill up every inch of the planner with ink. Clutter is the enemy of efficiency so the more leanly you can put your goals the better.

A final major tip is to take the time to write down every important date on the calendar section of your planner and visit it frequently so you never miss an event. Often enough people will mark these dates down on pages that they never review and it doesn’t serve to help. Making use of the calendar to mark down some long term goals and check them against progress you’ve made once that date comes around makes a good tool for monitoring how well you’ve been doing.