Plan With Me for 2021
By the end of the year, I’m always excited to buy a new planner and start planning for the year to come. It’s got to be pretty, but functional, and in the last few years, I’ve been hopping back and forth between traditional and nontraditional planner formats. While looking for a planner for 2021, I stumbled across this planner and it is the perfect mix of structure and freeform for my lifestyle and tastes. So grab your pens and your planner of choice and let’s plan for 2021.
In the past, I’ve utilized at least 2 notebooks for everything: one calendar planner and one notebook for lists, important dates, etc. This year, I found the Legend Planner and I love it because it consolidates everything into one place. I found that having to look more than one place for something left me even more unorganized and stressed about upcoming events or to-do lists, so I really love that this planner allows me the space to have everything in one compact book. I even bought these colored pens to color code my planner and help keep me more organized. It helps me visualize everything better.
First things first:
If you’re using an undated planner like me, go ahead and fill in all the months and dates. Then transfer all important dates from your old planner into your new one. For this step, I just focused on the monthly spreads. I’ll tackle the weekly spreads as they come up throughout the year. But if you’d like to get those done as well and have the time, feel free to fill in all the dates on all the pages. Even if you’re working with a dated planner, I always like to make sure any important dates or events get transferred first from the old planner to the new one.
Goals and Habits:
One thing I like to do is track my daily habits and I was really looking for a planner that had space for that. For me, habits include items like working out every day, drinking at least 3 glasses of water every day, and reading every day. Tracking habits (or really just making daily reminders for yourself) is a great thing to do, but if you don’t have a separate block to write them down in for each week, they can quickly fill up your days. This planner has a block each week specifically for habit tracking, and I love that. This planner really has everything: 1-year goals, vision boards, weekly habits, and bullet journal pages at the back.
I also love that each week has a “To-do List” for work and personal. For these blocks, I would add things like weekly chores, update my budget, tasks needed for the blog that week, etc. And then for all you doodlers out there, there’s a nice empty space for bullet journaling and other miscellaneous notes.
Another thing I’ve been trying to be intentional about is having SMART goals and really focusing on the “why” for having them. (Remember when I made my goals for 2020?) The way this planner is set up really gets you to think about your goals in that way, giving you spaces to answer why you want that specific goal achieved and what your action steps are to make it happen. I normally don’t care to slow down enough to get to that point, but it will really help you make significant advances toward reaching that goal if you do.
I’m not one for self-exploration or anything like that and I don’t journal, but I really liked the first few pages of this planner. The questions and writing prompts really help ground your thoughts and focus you on what you’re looking to achieve in the coming year. If you’re into dream/goal mapping, this planner is great for that. It has at least 5 pages dedicated to writing out your goals, and then every 3 months it has you write out those time-specific goals. If you’re just wanting to coast through life and have an easy place to write down important dates and keep track of birthday parties, then this probably isn’t the planner for you. But if you’re wanting to focus on meeting goals, change your habits, or own a business, then I think you would really benefit from something like this.
Lists:
Like I said, I used to have an entirely separate notebook for keeping lists, sometimes more. As you can imagine, the more places you write things down in, the easier it is to forget where you wrote it down. What I love about this planner is that it has extra pages in the back that can be used for anything. I used the bullet journal pages to make my lists. I reserved a few pages per list before sectioning out the next. Here are the categories I split my lists into in case you need a little inspiration:
The great thing about a planner like this is that it gives you so much space to make it your own and fit it into your own life. The bullet journal spaces are great for creatives who love to doodle and create their own sections, while the structure of the planner is still great for people who like straight-forward planners. I also love undated planners because who the heck decided that dated planners would start in August and end in December?? That’s 5 months wasted in any given planner! Undated planners allow me to use them to their fullest capacity and then start a new one without missing or wasting any pages. The only flaw is that the months are all at the front and then you get into the weekly spreads. For undated planners, I guess this makes the most sense, but I tend to prefer to have my month spread then the corresponding weekly pages immediately after. On the plus side, it does come with 3 bookmarks so you can mark the month and then the current week, so that makes navigating it a little easier.
I know this style of planner won’t be for everyone; some of you prefer fully digital planning, others just keep all that information stored away in their heads. I don’t think I’ll be utilizing every single aspect of this planner, but I’m excited to see how helpful it will be in keeping me organized this year.