lindsay emory

View Original

My 2019 Planners... as currently planned...

Alright FINE! 

If you follow me on Instagram, you already know. I’m a planner ‘ho.

Well… not really.

More like a high class planner escort.

I know what I like and I’m really good at what I do and it’s worth every penny.

….This is getting weird.

All I wanted to do was share my planner system for 2019. Or, what I have planned to be my planner system for 2019.

This is pretty special, you know. It might be the first time I’ve ever shared the whole kit and kaboodle. I don’t think I went through all this in September for #ReadWritePlan. (Oh – you don’t know about that? It’s my annual Instagram challenge that I co-host with Alexandra Haughton. You can search the hashtag on Instagram and make plans to join us this year, won’t you?)

Here goes.

I’m purposely keeping things as simple as possible this year. I can have my eye turned very quickly by pretty notebooks and cleverly designed planners. And I’m a member of a Facebook group populated by other writers and publishing people obsessed with paper planning. I see things all the time. Expensive, adorable things.

But yet. I resist.

Because I know what works for me:

A 2019 Hobonichi Techo Cousin is my main planner. I love the paper. The grids. The Japanese. I love having monthly, weekly and daily all in one A5 sized package. I had done morning pages for several years in a Moleskine before I started using a Hobonichi. Now I use the daily pages as my morning pages and it makes it so simple and portable. LOVE LOVE LOVE.

I also use a spiral bound Fabriano grid notebook. You can get it on Amazon. I also love the size and simplicity of it. What do I use the notebook for? Everything that comes up that I want to keep track of. The habit goes back to law school when my ethics professor advised always using the same system to record conversations, etc. I did it throughout my legal career and still do it now for calls with my agent, editor, etc. I take notes at conferences, brainstorm, make lists, etc. It’s basically a lot of et cetera in there. But it’s my system and it works for me.

Finally, I’m using my medium sized Louis Vuitton ring planner as a social media/ blog planner this year. I’ve used different things for this purpose in the past but I decided to buy some fresh inserts on Black Friday and see if I could make it work this year. 

Can’t resist a fold out calendar. I don’t know why a year at a glance is so tempting but it is. Not sure how I’m using this one yet…

I thought I’d list some social media/ website goals and tasks each month on these.

A homemade divider with a photo of a creative person to inspire me.

One thing I love about the Hobonichi is there are extra pages that you can do all sorts of things with. Here I turned the December 2018 month into my 2019 Reading Log. You can see where I incorporated Roni Loren’s reading challenge and Robin Covington’s reading challenges there on the left. I’ll just cross them off with my favorite gray mildliner when I’m done.

But I’m not sure how I should use some of the pages. They’re so tempting and blank right now but I just can’t think of something good for them. What do you think? How would you use them? What do you track? I need some ideas! Shocking, I know, but a planner never stops planning!

Click here for my 2020 planner line up!