2020 Planner Setup

Yesterday my wife asked me if got a new planner.  I was a little nonplussed for just a bit because I hadn’t.  But she continued, “Well, I saw a box from Franklin, so assumed you did.”  That’s when my man brain finally snapped to what she meant.   I ordered refills of the guts of my planner, but I assumed she was asking if I bought a new binder and the whole nine yards.  She has several planners squirreled around the house and at school.  I have one.

Anyhoo, my daily planner lives in the same binder I purchased last year.  The FC unstructured binder seems to be about right for me to carry most places.

The binder has 7 rings and holds pages that are half letter size or 5 1/2 inches by 8 inches.  You can see below that the front has slots for cards, etc and a flap for holding loose papers.  It also has pen loops on the front and back.

I like my binder to be “balanced” so that it is easier for me to write around the rings.   I put the planning sections toward the front. Now the calendars and daily pages are more “centered” on the rings and writing is easier with less ring sticking above the paper.

The front page is an identification sheet and then a 3 year calendar which is handy to make a quick look to see when a particular date in the future is.

I have several sections for planning purposes in the front of the binder.  These include my mission statement, unifying principles, long term and intermediate goals, projects and special information.  Bullet Journalers might call these collections.   One of my long term goals for 2020 is to read more non-fiction, so I have a sheet strictly for that.

I started back in the Franklin last year in April. Fortunately for me FC has several planners available on a quarterly start basis and my refill starts in April 2020.  I currently have the monthly calendars for all of 2020 in the book as well as the January, February and March daily pages.  Three months of daily pages seems to keep things balanced.

Overall, this is about an inch of paper.  I try to be ruthless and if I’m not using or don’t need pages, I don’t have them in my planner.

You may notice that the tabs are different colors.  The refill I selected for this year is the Leadership set.  I like the simple layout with sections for prioritized daily action list, scheduled events and daily notes.

I’ve discovered that I seem to work best in this size of planner.  Looking back over my professional life, I started using this size of planner around 1988 and kept with it for at least 20 of the past 31 years.