Crafting the perfect digital planner

Looking for the perfect planner

There is probably no such thing as the perfect planner - digital or otherwise.

However, I have spent a couple of months working out how best to include space for all the things I want to record.

Some of these things are:

• appointments
• receipts for things I buy for myself or the household
• recipes I find in the Coles magazine
• receipts for major bills
• records for the payments of subscriptions
• photos I take on my morning walk

• something I learnt about goal setting in the email I read this morning
• an idea I have for a new doll dress pattern
• things I am grateful for
• a list of achievements for the week or month
• cute doodles I drew in Procreate
• a folder tree for the items I am creating for my digital planner shop

My calendar section is a self contained 12 months. All dated for ease of use.

Wherever you are inside the calendar section you can click on the little house icon and get back to the first page with the whole year calendar.

After spending every day for a while now using my digital planner I have come to the conclusion that tabs like a paper planner are not all that useful.

I find it easier to go back to my documents sections and click on a new notebook for the thing that I want. I don't have to swap from pen to stylus which I find annoying. Just touch back to documents and touch the section notebook that you want.

I have all the notebooks I am using for my planner marked as favourites to make them easy to find.

Being organised makes me happy

Well... you get the idea. There are lots of little things that can make my life better if I have a place for them and I know where they are.

Something I tend to do a lot is start an idea that I want to come back to later. Trouble is, bits of paper get lost, journal pages get forgotten, space for more thoughts is used up for something else.

With a digital notebook I can put an idea on a page, list that idea in a contents page then add in as many pages as I need for that idea or future ideas. If I have a 31 page notebook with an index I can fill that notebook with 31 ideas and start a new notebook if I have more than 31 ideas and everything is sneatly aved in one place.

Here is one of my 31 page notebooks. This one has photo frame layout pages and is perfect for journaling every day of the month. You can export it each month as a PDF to keep in your iBooks. The quality of the photos and text is really good and it even prints out quite respectably.

Use the index page to see what is inside with just a glance. No need to write something for every page but some pages will have items you want to come back to.

What I like about this is that it doesn't matter if I don't look at those ideas again for 6 months, 12 months or 3 years. I can store them in a Goodnotes folder called ideas and come back to them whenever I like.

If I have more than one note about the same idea I can easily bring them together too.

Choose the sections that you want

• I created my new planner with separate notebooks for each section.
• I can easily insert extra pages.
• At the end of the year I can store the notebooks into folders by section or by year.
• To set up for the next year I just need a new dated planner notebook and copies of all the other sections that I already have saved in my clean copies folder.

The sections that I use all the time are:

• The calendar planner with dates and weekly pages and monthly expenses, goals, review.
• The Bills and Budget notebook
• The Recipe notebook 
• The Goals for 2021 notebook
• The Daily Journal notebook
• The Places to Visit notebook (for the day when I can feel safe on a plane again for domestic travel)

I also have a notebook for my 5 year plans.

With big titles for each book it is easy to open the one that I want. 

Happy Planning,

Val