Are You a Planner?

I am a planner :) I'm also pretty go-with-the-flow as long as said change of plans does not affect my sleep in any way! But I really enjoy planning. When I read the book The Happiness Project the author talked a lot about how research has shown that a lot of the excitement and happiness that comes from things comes from the act of looking forward to them. Wahoo, that means the planners among us may be happier because we look forward to things AND enjoy them when they come (as long as you are not always, always looking to the next thing that is!).

Being the planner that I am, I really enjoy using a paper planner as my calendar. I love to write notes to myself in the margins and writing in huge letters trips or events I am super excited for. When Amber wrote last year about the Erin Condren life planner, I knew I had to have one. But, they are not the cheapest things ever and I already had a planner that was going to last me until August 2011, so I kept that one. However, as soon as the 2011-2012 life planners came out, I was ready to order one!

It took me quite awhile to decide which planner I wanted, but I finally decided to go with the one where you can put 6 of your own pictures on the front. It's a little more expensive but I figured it would make me happy when I am sitting in faculty meetings, and that's worth a few extra dollars :)

My planner arrived a couple of weeks later, and I swear opening it was like opening a present. The box was decorated, and the planner was wrapped in purple tissue paper. The planner itself? Beautiful...

I have only used it for a little over a week now but here are the top 10 things like about it...

1. I love the pictures on the front.

2. The planner is filled with great quotes.

3. I like the tabs for each month, it helps me flip to any given time pretty easily.

4. I like how each day is divided into morning, day, night.

5. I like how each week has a spot for goals and a to do list. You can see my to do list for vacation week is quite intense... haha, okay fine it's a "to NOT do" list

6. I like the zip pocket and the folder "keep it together" at the back of the planner. I stick checks I get from tutoring in my planner until I get to the bank and I need some kind of folder to hold them because I can't be losing those :)

7. Each planner comes with several free gift labels with your name on them, which is a nice bonus.

8. The overall planner is made well. I have a feeling it will last a long time even though I use it a lot and throw it into different bags and stacks of notebooks all day long.

9. It comes with fun stickers that you can add to important days. This is something I can see myself doing when I'm bored at a professional development training or something (cuz those are always so fascinating). I have put a few in already though...

10. Finally, I just love all the colors- they are bright and fun, but I think still look professional enough that I won't mind having my planner in my hand while talking to my boss.

I also have a couple of small complaints, although they are probably things I will get used to soon. The first is, if you look at the picture above, the spiral binding in the middle is really large, which means that if I want to write what I need to do on Wednesday, I have to fold back the whole page otherwise the binding gets in the way of my hand trying to write. Since I really like to be able to look at the whole week at once, this just annoys me a little sometimes. Also, the calendar itself focuses more on monthly blocks (as you can tell by the tabs) which means that at the end of the month you may not see a whole week on one page because the monthly calendar is in the middle. You can see what I mean below...

So when I get to the week of November 28th, I'll only be able to see 3 pages and then I'll have to turn a couple of pages to get to the rest of the week. I'm sure this is just something I'll have to get used to because I definitely live by life looking at the week to week schedule :) On the other hand, my old planner had all the monthly calendars at the front of the planner and so therefore I never used them.

The last thing I'm not used to yet is how big the planner is. It's measurements are 7" by 9" which is a little bigger than my old planner, but it's also a lot thicker. Again, I think I'll get used to this very quickly, but I was surprised by it at first.

Overall, I really like this planner and definitely recommend ordering it :) (In case it wasn't obvious by the fact that I said I waited a long time to buy this planner, I did not get this planner for free and was not in any way compensated for talking about it on my blog- I just had a lot of people ask me about it so I thought you may want to know)

Are you a planner? Do you use a paper planner?