Planner vs BUJU vs Digital (Finding your own planner flow)

Hey Friends

I’ve been playing with various versions of planning again, and not that anyone asked but I still find a combination of digital and paper the best combination for me. Mainly because of storage. I would love to have space to house tons of books, well maybe anyway it would be atheistic for sure, if not a bit wasteful. If and when we are able to get more space – 900 SF is what we live in right now, we hope to have at least a small amount of our favorite books so I may be able to keep my planners in the future, but for now, I just don’t have the space to keep them long term. 

I want to discuss Bullet Journals a little, as I used to use notebooks as a kid through college, a very simple method that you will see matches my type of planning I still use today. Now, I am just over 30, I graduated HS in 2007 and was in college pretty much right after. So my options were limited and what I preferred for planning was a notebook, in college I was able to find top opening notebooks which I much prefer! 

I like the first page as a monthly page. I drew out the month and put the 1 – 30(1) days on there, with any events, holidays, and assignments due. I didn’t do boxes, just straight up do the calendar, highlight or circle the days – then under it write the things and highlight the date on both. Then the next pages were a daily or weekly to-do list, depending on how busy I was. I did this mostly as a Senior in HS and through college. It really helped me keep crap organized. I tossed them when done and didn’t think too hard about the method as I was a kid really, it worked for me and that is what I needed – just some dedicated space. I bet a lot of us planners found a method similar to this in their lives when they got busy but a planner didn’t always have the needed space. I’m just very much a list person. I’m not super visual but put it in a list and I’ll get it done.

This is still how I plan pretty much now, when I designed my own pages this is what I focused on. I needed to see the month – though I still change that up sometimes as I like to record things on the daily pages, and then everything else is pretty much a list. What to do today, this week, this year. I also wanted to do dated as nobody got time for that. I love the concept of the weekly layout and occasionally find fun in decorating and memory planning on it – but I go back to the list for productivity for myself. It’s just what I personally like. People are different and that is why I think it’s so important to find the method that works for you. 

Now when it comes to digital I do a lot here as well. I prefer to journal digitally – I go back to 2007 currently! I’ve always been a talker. I started this because I found in a move my family threw my notebooks away – and I was not happy about it, they swear they didn’t but as of today, frickin’ 15 years later, they have not magically turned up. So I stopped trusting paper would be around all the time and I wanted a record, easy to store anyway. It’s nice to be able to go back and see the crazy (for learning purposes or entertainment), what was happening around me, and how I was dealing with it. I can go back a few years and see where I was struggling with workplaces, and reflect on it. One job was so toxic I wasn’t allowed to do anything extra on the computer so if I opened the notepad they flipped out. We grow, we learn, and I love having those moments. 10/10 Suggest. 

I also really just enjoy typing a lot, the feeling is nice when you are just writing from your head. 

I use the calendar a lot, to keep up with events and because I am on several teams (I work remotely and digitally a lot). I also use Google Keep a lot to stash things I find only if I want to find it again. For example, Reddit only saves so many things, so I lost a lot when I learned that, so now I resave really cool things to keep so I can always find em’ if I really thought they were nifty or fun. We also keep a lot of tracking items digitally – this is for ease of math though lol as in Excel you can program that and it makes it easy to get a nice average or see exactly what you need to set aside for taxes, for example. 

I read online too, I find it easier than books and collecting a ton of Manga. I love my kindle and I find it easier than a book, but again there are some I find I want to own – Sanderson, Lord of the Rings, some art books, etc – one day when we can. Here is my Goodreads! My goal this year is 26 (double last year) Fiction books. 

The final digital thing I do is record my planner flip-throughs and save them for myself, then recycle the actual planners. I would actually love to keep future planners, but my space is limited and this is the best solution for me right now. This is really nice to do if you can’t store them or don’t want to for privacy reasons. You can take a good recording and just flip through it and see your past all right there. 

I have just found I really prefer paper planning, even if I change it up occasionally. I prefer not to have to make the sheets every week, as I have determined from trying the NUJU methods. I’m sad as I love notebooks and hoard them still, but truly having it predesigned is easiest and most productive for me.

If you love bullet journaling but are tired of writing it out every time, check out my basic insert post, to go over how I create mine.

Now, as a side note, for digital planning with Goodnotes or doing a BUJU – it comes back down to the same reasons – I like the paper feeling and I like not having to make it every day. Digital has the same requirements as bullet journaling to me – too much time to make it how I want it to look each day. I do think the use of stickers in the system is really cool and it’s a goal to add some to my digital store, but for me I just want paper. I understand if this is what you enjoy – I have a ton of friends who use it and I have tried it and own Goodnotes (an amazing program you should get anyway, even if you don’t use it for that as you can load any PDFs in there and mark them up).  

Again, no one asked but I am working to get back into writing and I thought this would be a good way to start. It’s been on my mind as I bought an Archer and Olive and it’s gorgeous but I am just not that into making the layouts, etc sadly

Have a happy week,