Friday, July 17, 2015

Accomplishments and confessions

This year, as I did for most years, started with a planner and the best of intentions to:  map out my week, keep track of what I was doing, and make sure I was on top of all my deadlines.  But something happened along the way...and I've actually stuck with it for the entire year so far, and I doubt I'm going to stop, because it's actually been really useful to keep track of freelancing  assignments that have a tendency to overlap one another and bunch up.

(Also--Scrivener rules and if you're a serious writer you should just shell out $40 because it's just that awesome and incredibly powerful.  I've been finding that the "word count target" feature is really useful when writing fiction.)

It's a simple, cheap planner (read:  the only one I could afford as of last year) but it does the trick:  the vertical week layout is nice, and my handwriting isn't that big, so even though the columns are only about an inch wide it's pretty okay in terms of the amount of space I have to work with.  I have an addiction to Moleskine products, as I've mentioned before, and since they sell vertical planners, I'd already set aside some money for buying their planner for 2016 next year and that would have been the end of that.  

Except.

I clicked on a video on decorating planners on YouTube, and have become entirely obsessed with the idea of purchasing an Erin Condren planner.  It is, as far as I can tell, the Cadillac planner of people who decorate their planners--with washi tape, fancy Post-It notes, stickers, arrays of markers and stamps.   And this from someone who has, to date, owned exactly two rolls of washi tape.  I don't quite know what it is about watching people decorate their planners that is so hypnotic.  I do know that I've already put in an order for two different sets of fancy sticky notes (from Japan) with the idea of making a 2016 planner totally glam-worthy.  (My personal style tends to be more understated, actually, and it's hard not to feel a little ridiculous about all the stickers and stuff when your main writing implement is a Parker fountain pen).


The main thing is the vertical weekly layout over two pages.  I've been trying to find another planner (yeah, I know it's early) that has this feature and I've been coming up short.  Yeah, there's the Moleskine Dashboard  and that's probably what I'll end up ordering, but, well, it's black.  The pages are pedestrian--boring, even.  At the very least, they could have a bit of color, right?  But that's not Moleskine's style, and frankly, it's not really mine, either.  I mean, I do use sticky notes in my planner and I do have a set of markers that I use to highlight things and block out days, but the kind of insanity that prompts people to spend that much time planning out their weeks is a little much, even for me.  

And at the end of the day, well, it's a planner.  It doesn't really matter how pretty it looks if you never get done what you planned.  On the level that matters, I realize this, just as I realize that spending $70 (the actual planner is "only" $50, but international shipping is an extra $20) on a planner borders on the insane and ridiculous.  But still, there's a part of me that wants to try...

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