Who would’ve thought I’d be multi-planning?
Recently, I have made the switch from having 1 bullet journal/planner to having 4. I completely forgot that I had bought the Happy Planner Mini bookish planner which will serve as my reading planner starting July.
Why the change?
As mentioned in my Happy Planner Haul post, it was for the sake of organizing my life better and for the flexibility of taking the HUB/everyday planner everywhere I go. Before, I had to take larger bags with me in order to carry my bullet journal, which wasn’t a huge deal but got annoying from time to time. Not to mention, while franken-planning / franken-bujoing works for some people….it overwhelms me. It wasn’t necessary for me to have all those categories with me on the go. So I decided to split them all into their own planners.
The Madness of Multi-planning
Multi-planning offers the opportunity to have more control over categories in your life. This allows you the opportunity to better control the tasks you have to do and if you are someone like me who gets overwhelmed at seeing a million things on one page with no break-down… you can go into more detail in each aspect and break them down into several achievable steps.
Be warned! You could just as well overwhelm yourself with having too many planners. I’ve seen some planner addicts have 5 to 7 planners and for me that is too much. You need to think about what is possible and doable for you! What can help you better plan your day/month/year. Maybe multi-planning is not the best method for you. Maybe having 1 planner with one worded/one sentence tasks is the way to go.
For those of you who could benefit from multi-planning, the trick to it is to break your day to day down into categories.
The Method to Multi-planning
Breaking your day to day down into categories is the KEY to multi-planning. Each category becomes a theme that your planner will follow. For example, my major categories were:
- Everyday
- Social Media
- Budgeting
- Reading
These are things that I consider important/are things I tend to do all the time. For you, it might be Fitness, Home, and Business or Memory Keeping, Wellness, and Meal Planning.
By assigning these categories as themes to your planners, you are giving the planner a purpose. The planners should ONLY have tasks that are related to that theme which will help you be consistent in using the multiple planners.
Videos on having multiple planners:
In my case:
The Everyday planner will be for daily activities and life tasks. It will be where I keep track of my habits, have my shopping lists, meal plans for the week, keep tabs on appointments, and anything else that has to do with my day to day. It’s something that I use on a daily basis to help me keep track of where I’m at for the day and what I didn’t get to.
It will have one-word hints at the other three planners so that I’m reminded that I have tasks to do within those other categories. I won’t reiterate the tasks in this planner as it’s redundant and it will ultimately end up with me not using the other three.
The Social Media planner will be where I plan all the social media content, blog content, and keep track of events and blog projects. It will also be a place where I jot down marketing strategies such as Keyword research and Pinterest pin planning. I usually have two days dedicated to just social media stuff which are Monday and Tuesdays. In those two days I write and schedule the posts for the weekend, take pictures for Instagram and blog posts, blog hop, touch up old posts to make sure they are SEO compliant, and so on.
The Budget planner is self-explanatory. With all my new bills (tailwind, photoshop, Amazon Prime, domain name, self-hosting …etc) this year, I needed to better track my spending.
With the budget companion pack that I bought, I’ll be able to track my bills better, my debt repayment, my spending, and allow me a space where I put myself on a buying ban. The pack comes with a space to write out my monthly, quarterly, mid-year, and yearly monetary goals, a space to detail out my long term goals for budgeting, and a savings tracker. I only budget once a week, usually on a Saturday.
Lastly, the Reading planner. I haven’t used it yet since it’s a July 2020 to June 2021 planner. This mini planner will be used for writing down notes on what I read that day and keeping track of how many pages I’m reading that day/week/month.
So there you have it! This is the method I’ve been using these last couple of weeks and so far it’s been working great for me. Having planners that don’t stray from the specific theme gives me more room to be creative and allows me to schedule my days easily. I no longer have to fit everything into a small space because everything has its own dedicated space!
Do you have multiple planners? What planning method has worked for you? Let me know in the comments below!
xoxoxo,
Jeimy