End of the Year Planning Tip # 3 – Evaluate Your Planner’s Performance

With Christa, the Christmas Elf with a Plan – 3 December

Christa’s back today with another fabulous End of the Year Planning Tip – Evaluate your planner’s performance. Is your planner working for you? Helping you stay focused and productive, getting things done, and basically protecting your sanity? Or is your planner just one more huge task on your already overwhelming task list?

Evaluating Your Planner

We need to periodically evaluate our planner content and processes to determine if they are fulfilling out needs or not. This is true whether you are a fairly new planner user or have, like me, been using some form of planner system for decades. Just as our lives change from year to year and season to season, what we need in our planner changes, too. (Note: My use of season is as in “season of life”, not a holiday or weather season.) Whenever you are preparing to set up a new planner, have gone through a big change in your life, or just feel like your planner isn’t being as helpful as you’d like; it’s a good idea to take a little time to evaluate your current planner setup and how you use it.

A Planner Should Be Like a Personal Assistant

My planner is as close as I expect to ever come toward having a personal assistant. But what if I did have a personal assistant that accompanied me throughout my day? Someone to record all the key information – dates, times, locations, events, and item lists, task lists, etc. Someone that could coordinating my plans with others. Someone that would constantly reminded me of what, where, with whom, why and possibly how I was to execute the next hours of my day. I would expect them to be capable of doing so. In the case of a planner, that comes down to pages and writing instruments – or apps and devices for digital planners. But even the most skilled personal assistant would not be able to do their job satisfactorily without the right communication. With planners, that comes down to how we utilize them throughout our day.

Does your Personal Assistant (planner system) enable you to “Sleigh all Day” like Christa is thinking (see picture on left) – checking off item after item on all your lists? You want your planner to support you in achieving productivity, efficiency, taming the chaos, and meeting your goals – every day.

Or does your Personal Assistant (planner system) create more work for you? Like Christa is thinking in the picture on the right, do you have to schedule time to do Planner Tasks that are in addition to all the other tasks in life. I love a beautiful planner spread just as much as anybody, but I’ve not found them to increase my productivity much. I do consider myself to be a creative, crafty person and will doodle and decorate my pages sometimes. Doing so brings me joy, but it is not a necessary step in planning.

Evaluate Your Planner’s Performance

So it’s time to have a performance review with your personal assistant (planner system). Ask the following:

• What is working well and of benefit?
  • What forms/pages do I use consistently?
  • Are they easy to enter information into?
  • Is is easy to retrieve the information as I need it?
• What is not working well?
  • Are there forms/pages that I need to use, but they are difficult because they either don’t include information needed, or expect information not relevant for me?
  • Are there forms/pages I think I need, but don’t have? Do I have information that I don’t know where to record?
  • Are there forms/pages that are just difficult to use because the format doesn’t fit the way my brain orders information?
  • Are there pages that are just clutter because I don’t need or use them?

Ask yourself the same questions with regards to stickers, highlighters, specials pens/markers, etc. If you are using it in your planning process, is it of benefit?

You should now have a good idea of what you want in your next planner. For changes or additions needed, brainstorm or research alternatives. For pages and forms, I like to start with a blank sheet or dot grid paper, a pencil and a ruler and layout an draft form that I can use to tweak to find what I really need. Then I can either find something very close I can adapt, or create one for myself. If find this much more economical than buying another package of forms only to discover, they don’t meet my needs.

What if What Isn’t Working Well is Me?

It is possible that you’ve evaluated your planner and are feeling like the real problem is that you:

• Just don’t use it (forget to use it)
• Are afraid to mess it up
• Don’t know how to use it

You are not alone. Especially if you are just getting into planning. It takes time to create habits that have you automatically reaching for your planner to jot something down. I have a post about creating routines that include your planner, you can read it here.

Don’t be afraid to mess up. Use a pencil and erase it. Or get some white out and cover it up. Put a sticker or washi tape over it. Some people use erasable pens; I don’t and probably ought to write a post explaining why I don’t use them in any planner or document I plan to retain for any length of time. The only thing that is important about your planner’s appearance and that the information you put in can be retrieved by you (or those you share it with). There’s a reason that most of the pictures shared on social media are “before the pen” pics of beautiful planner layouts. Note: they are not tagged as “highly successful and productivity enhancing planner layouts”. I saw a Christmas spread someone did recently, and they left no room whatsoever on a weekly spread to write anything.

Come back tomorrow to see Christa’s next End of Year Planning Tip! If you missed the earlier tips, you can go back to the first tip here.

Happy Planning,

Linda