Why planning?

I’ve always loved the idea of a planner. Any stationery really. As a kid, my favourite time of year was back to school time, when Mum would take me to Big W to get all my school stationery. And one day I discovered that Officeworks existed, and I was in heaven. Contacting school books was the best, and I’m secretly so excited to do that for my daughter Zoey when she starts school next year 🤣

As I got older, I was drawn to the prettiness of planning. The colours, the stickers, making it look perfect. But in real life I’m not really an aesthetic kinda gal. I have messy writing, plans change and get crossed out, I would forget or skip weeks then I’d feel judged by the empty pages staring blankly at me (pun intended).

So I went all in on digital. I use my phone calendar for everything, otherwise it won’t happen. If I don’t track appointments and events somewhere, they leave my brain immediately. I tried some digital planners, but I felt like they were a lot of work for what they were, they needed so much manual setting up and input. So I just continued along using my iPhone calendar and it does the job. If things change, there’s no messy crossing out and writing over.

I still kept coming back to the idea of paper planning. My iPhone calendar is great for keeping track of appointments, but I didn’t feel like it was keeping me organised. I have to specifically look at a day to see the appointments, and would often be surprised by calendar alerts popping up telling me it was time to leave for something that I had completely forgotten about 😬 I wanted something bigger picture to give me an overview of my weeks and months. I also often find myself wanting to spend less time on my phone (don’t we all), but it’s hard when every single thing in my life lives on there. So I thought, I need to start finding other ways of managing things that don’t involve my phone.

So I started again looking at paper planners. There are some stunning planners out there. I’ve bought a lot of them 🤣 But I always found the same issue of missing weeks and feeling guilty, wishing there was a section for budgeting, or project planning, and that so much space in my day wasn’t wasted by hydration tracking, or that things were maybe in a different order.

Then one day it hit me - I thought, I did a couple of Adobe InDesign courses back in the day, I reckon I could dig up my skills and just make my own planner. And almost before I finished thinking that thought, I had another thought - I can’t be the only one who feels this way about planners.

So I started designing. I decided early on that everything had to be follow these rules:

• Never assume how anyone might want to use it. If you’ve seen the shopping list in The Meals Insert, you’ll notice there’s no meat category. I personally eat meat, but I know a lot of people don’t, so why should they have a whole section wasted on their shopping list? Instead, there’s a “fridge” section, where meat will happily live if you’re a meat eater. In The Health Inseet, there’s no hydration tracker, training tracker, or weight tracker. Track what means the most to YOU, what makes YOU feel the most healthy, in YOUR current phase of life.
• Every page must be able to be pulled out and put wherever anyone wants to put it. Want to keep all your meal planning pages in one section? Great. Want to keep this week’s meal plan with your current week in your main planner section? No problem. This happens to go against the grain of the traditional ‘spread’ layout of most planners, because it means everything reads front to back, as opposed to left to right. But my goal is not to be the prettiest or most aesthetic planner, it’s to be the most functional and practical. If I design in left to right spreads, then the other sides of those pages are wasted if the pages are to be moved around. Designing front to back means that everything is movable, so anyone can arrange their planner exactly how they want to.
• You must be able to start anytime. What if it’s April and you want to sort your life out? Should you have to wait for next year, or waste months from this year’s planner? Make it make sense 😂 All Home Base products are available either undated, or in dated versions that start a new 3 month period every month. So you’re never wasting more than a week or two at the absolute worst.
• Everything should be based on 3 month periods. Life changes constantly. What works for you at one point might not work later, or you might just change your mind and want to try something new. If you decide you need more space, that’s fine, next time you can try the Daily version. If The Health Insert isn’t for you, that’s all good. You’re never locked into a whole year of something that isn’t working for you.
• Function before looks, always. As I said above, my goal is not to be the prettiest planner out there. Of course I put a lot of work into making it look good, but if I have a design choice between function and prettiness, function will win every time.

I love the system that I’ve built, as an ADHDer it strikes exactly the right balance between having enough structure to support me, and too much structure to feel restrictive. Of course I have weeks where I’m constantly running and keeping my head above water and I don’t even look at my planner. And that’s ok, because that’s literally the whole point. I use the undated version, so I just start back again the next week and nothing is wasted 🤍