End of the Year Planning Tip #18 – Begin Migrating Data to Your New Planner

With Christa, the Christmas Elf with a Plan – 18 December

Is it time for End of the Year Planning Tip #18 already?  Where is the time going?  Christa says its time to take pen in hand and begin migrating data to your new planner.  Looks like wants to do a little decorating. I see that washi tape and the gold metallic gel pen. So no more waiting. Let’s get started!

Migrating Data to a New Planner

Picking up that pen and pointing it at a brand-new planner can feel a little intimidating.  Planners can be a big investment, and we don’t want to mess it up.  But it will be fine.  It will be like all handcrafted items – perfectly imperfect.  And yes, once you put pen to paper, you are crafting your plans and creating a handwritten account of your life.   Choose an easy place to start like entering important dates you want to include on your calendar(s).

Compiling the Important Dates

Important dates include all the dates that would impact your day-to-day planning.  If it is something you would plan for or plan around, it’s an important date.  Examples of these might include:

• Birthdays
• Anniversaries
• Holidays
• School related dates
• Team schedules
• Community (Church/Club) meetings
• Event dates from your future log

For holidays, I use timeanddate.com to confirm dates for the new year.  You can select the year and country to get a list of “official” holidays by clicking here. That link should default to 2025 and United States, but you can easily change those parameters.   If you want to add some fun “holidays” to your planner – like Thank Your Mailman Day (4 February) or Send a Card to a Friend Day ( 7 February), you’ll find that here.

Entering the Important Dates in Your Planner

Where you enter your important dates in your planner is up to you and the pages you use.  You can enter them all on year-at-a-glance calendar pages.  Or you can enter them on your monthly calendar pages.   Maybe you’d rather just enter them on the weekly or daily pages.  You can enter them on all three, if it suits you.  It depends on how you plan each month and/or week and where you look to see what in coming up.   Entering them on year-at-a-glance pages gives you a big picture view that is very helpful for scheduling into the future.  For example, planning a vacation and being able to see all the things going on across multiple months as you work out when taking a vacation would fit best.  Seeing your important dates on the monthly calendar page brings them into narrower view with more room for details. This might be most helpful for your weekly and daily planning. If you enter them on the year-at-a-glance or monthly calendar pages, you can likely wait until you are closer to the date to add them to your weekly or daily pages

You may be asking yourself if you should enter these dates with an ink pen or just “pencil them in”.   Fixed dates like birthdays, anniversaries and holidays are fine to enter with an ink pen.  They are going to occur on that date regardless of anything else that happens in life.  If dates are firm and historically, they don’t change but could – I would probably still use a pen.  Dates that can shift, i.e. club meetings or team schedules, I might just pencil those in.

Capturing Your Remaining Future Log Items

At this point my future log is a mix of specific tasks or things to plan.  Tasks are the items that direct us to take a specific action, like “schedule six-month HVAC inspection for the first week of May” that is written in the future log section for April.   Things to plan would be like the April entry for “make plans for the girls summer visit”.  That is telling me that in April I need to be doing a number of things to get my time hanging out with my granddaughters in April so than come June I have on my calendar all the details their visit(s) with me over the summer.

Personal preferences and processes come into play again.  How you process these items depends on how you generate and maintain tasks lists and how you do your monthly planning.  My planner designs include monthly planning (and review) pages. The planning page are used to capture tasks and things that come up months prior to when I will actually be planning for that month.  I prefer a running task list that carries over from day to day.  Each week, as I plan, I add the new tasks for that week. And as I complete tasks, I check them off the list. These tasks come from my goals, project and other plans that are documented in sections of my planner. Tasks are added from these areas to the monthly plan and allocated to the weeks in the month during monthly planning.

If I get ahead and complete all my tasks for the week, I can pull from next week’s allocated tasks. Or I may treat myself to some me time. If I get all the tasks for the month completed early, I can go back to my goals, projects and other plans to add the tasks to execute the next steps in my action plans.

Whenever my task list starts running out of space, getting too messy, or needs of cleaning up, I start fresh list on a new task sheet  I do this by carrying over any uncompleted tasks to the new task list sheet and archiving the old task list sheet.

So I would take everything in the February through December sections of the future log and transfer it to my monthly planning pages.  I would likely do the same with January and process it as I plan for January next week.   Another option, if feasible, would be to carry your 2025 Future Log over into your new planner to access during your monthly planning sessions.  Just make sure your processes carry this information forward in a way that it doesn’t get lost.

Labeling, Rearranging and Decorating

Now might be a good time to label any sections or create and pages you’ll be needing.  If you have ideas for rearranging things to streamline your planning and your planner, get that done and check it off your list, too.   And this is purely, optional, decorate a little and make it your planner.  Pull out your washi tape and stickers and have fun.

You could add your Word of the year to your planner at this point.  Make sure it’s visible and will inspire and motivate you.  If this planner is a new format for you or if you are new to planning, take a little time just looking it over and getting acquainted.  You’re going to be spending a lot of time together after all.

Summary

It can be a little scary to open a brand new, pristine planner and begin to write in it.  That brand new, pristine planner is just another planner, until you start sharing all that you find important with it.  Once you’ve spoken to it by writing those first bits of information, it becomes Your Planner.   Starting by entering important dates like birthdays, anniversaries and holidays is one of the easiest things to start with because it’s hard to overthink dates that are fixed.  The next step of transitioning the future log, details you’ve collected over the last year with your old planner, is a little like passing the torch.  Decorating your planner with colors, designs and words that speak to you will make using your new planner even more pleasant.

But I know we’re not done.  I can’t wait to see what Christa will recommend for us tomorrow.

Happy Planning,

Linda

P.S. If you’ve just found Christa, you can go back and check out all her tips. It begins with Tip #1 which you’ll find by clicking here.