Updated Sep. 22, 2019.  Originally published Dec. 18, 2012.

We’re going to try to tackle Calendars/Appointments and To-do lists before the end of the year, so we can have day-to-day systems in place to get the new year started on the right foot.  And then we’ll tackle household/maintenance and routines right away in January – again, so we can get off to a strong start.  Although the other areas are all important to organize, they’re not all as integral to our daily functioning, so we can take them a little more slowly.

Calendar Options

Let’s take a brief look at what sorts of organizational options there are.  Why?  It won’t help you to have a system, if the system doesn’t work well with the way you think.  You need to buy or design a system that works for you, and in order to do that, you need to have a “big picture” idea of some of the major options.

• pre-printed/pre-made day planners (usually spiral-bound, disc-bound, or looseleaf)
• 3-ring binder
• tablet/smartphone/PDA
• desktop/laptop computer
• wall calendar
• file boxes
• index cards
• sticky notes
• tickler files

For More Help: The Great Big Guide to Planner Binding Options

What Do You Need for Tracking Appointments?

Think about your lifestyle, and about how you work best.

• How “big picture” do you need to get?  Do you need two pages for each day’s appointments?  Or do you have few enough appointments that a month view is sufficient?  Or maybe something in-between, like a week-at-a-glance view.
• Do you tend to rearrange a lot?  Or do you write down a task and then address it “religiously” as written?  Do you transfer things from a general “to-do” list to a daily list?  Do you write your to-do’s in as appointments?
• How much portability do you need?
• Who needs to be able to see it?  Just you?  Your whole family?  You and your spouse?
• Do you like to use technology for this purpose, or do you prefer pen-and-paper?  (Technology has some great benefits, but if you’re paper-and-ink girl, you’ll never use it consistently.  If you’re interested in a hybrid, the Rocketbook is a pretty awesome option.)

Figure out what “features” you need in a calendar, and buy/create/set up your calendar system.

Note that David Allen (of Getting Things Done fame) would suggest that the only things that should go on a calendar are those things are time-specific (in other words, appointments).  If it doesn’t have to get done at that time, you’ll know it, and you’ll start to take it less seriously.  So time-non-specific tasks may be better assigned to the task list than the calendar.  Just something to think about as you decide how much space you need.

Another thing to note – apart from the possibility of using one “bird’s eye view” calendar and a regular daily planner, if you can at all help it, don’t use more than one system for the same set of information.  It is inevitable that you will fail to transfer information and miss things.  It’s generally a bad idea, for instance, to use separate calendars for work and home; you only have one life!  If you need to differentiate, consider color-coding or a similar approach within your single system to identify which commitments are for work and which are for home.  (As an added bonus, this may also help you visualize how well you have balanced your schedule.)

My System

I’ve used a variety of systems over the years; it’s constantly in flux — as you’ll readily see if you do much digging here on the blog!  For about eight or ten years, I used a Pocket-size Day-Timer.  I love it because it’s very compact, so it’s quite portable; I can integrate it with my wallet and never forget to take it with me.  It served me very well, in terms of my calendar and to-do lists, but any other notes I take aren’t easy to integrate, so I kept ending up with bits of paper everywhere and couldn’t ever find my notes.

And I am a rearranger.  So I tried a planner of my own creation inside a 5.5″x8.5″ sketchbook.  I added monthly calendar pages and daily pages that I designed to be similar in format to the Day-Timer pages I’ve been using.  And I used sticky notes on the other pages for tasks and notes, so I could  move them around – and take random notes but then get them all gathered into one place.

It started out looking like this.  Monthly pages like this (to have the dates filled in, obviously):

And a daily page that looks like this (with blank space at the bottom that you really can’t see in the picture).

It worked okay for a while, but then I tweaked still further.  What I currently have [late 2019] is a DIY (homemade/self-made) planner, 5.5×8.5″, comb-bound.  This seems to be a pretty good balance for me.  The comb-binding is pretty compact, so it isn’t bulky, but (because I have a comb-binding machine), I can add and remove pages.  It’s a bit of work, so it isn’t something I can readily adjust every day, but pages can be swapped out every month or so.

[UPDATE 4/2021: I recently discovered Tula XII, which is a travelers’ notebook-style planner company, and I’m giving that a try.  Individual pages aren’t as moveable as with the comb-bound book, but it’s still a mix of compactness & flexibility.  It’s a little smaller, at 5×7, and might turn out to be too small, but I really like how compact it is, so…time will tell.]

What Does Your Calendar Look Like?

I don’t know about you all, but it helps me to see what other people’s systems look like, even if they wouldn’t work for me exactly as-is.  I just need concrete examples.  So if you get a chance, leave a comment linking up some pictures of your calendars!  (Of course, be careful not to show us any personal information.)