How I Plan My Year Using Mostly Paper (and a Little Notion)
Full transparency—I have been working in this style for over six months now but moving into two new planners is making this much more invigorating! Knowing what is already working for me is pretty refreshing. Usually I just wait til the end of the year, see what planner looks like it might work, and give it a try. Some planners and journals stick at least until summer and a few have only made it to Valentine’s Day but not many make it allllll the way to the end of the year. Over the summer I got more into a mode of just winging it and seeing what sticks, and the results are an odd combination of convoluted and overly simple. Let me explain.
My 2026 Planner Ecosystem consists of:
- a simple notepad
- a personal journal
- a planner for the home (and homeschool)
- an index card system
What goes in the notepad?
For me, this list is just too many places to store information. Or at least that’s what I would have told you if you’d suggested it to me. What I found, though, is that I go through sticky notes so often because I am constantly jotting down thoughts, reminders, and mind maps. I don’t want to “ugly” up my journal with all these random thoughts and ideas so I put them on sticky notes, receipt backs, margins—anywhere that I am at a real risk of losing the notes. While I do want to refer back to them I also know that most of these items are more of a temporary holding space. A short list of what I see when I flip through The Notepad:
- grocery lists and shopping lists for the home
- notes I took while on the phone with doctors, friends, you name it
- recipes someone rattled off quickly and I wanted to try out before I put them in our family recipe book
- event planning brainstorms and ideas
- packing lists for off-island trips and our recent move
- notes I took from an audiobook
These things are relevant at the time but not necessarily important enough to add to the archives. Recipes that end up being approved by the fam make their way into the family recipe book. The packing lists help, and give me a place to work from, but after the trip I likely won’t look at it again. This is where The Notepad comes in. It lives in my kitchen for the most part but it does make the occasional trip to Costco with me as well. I don’t generally rip any pages out of it. Once I finish the one I have been working through, I’ll grab another from the big box of unused notebooks I have in a closet already.
The personal journal—tried and true.
The Personal Journal has always been in my rotation every since I started branching out my paper-crafting. First it was scrapbooks, then Erin Condren Planners turned into Bullet Journals and then one gorgeous Archer & Olive after another. Having the space to write (and scrap) things just for me is a necessity.
This year I am trying out an astrology planner because I have been learning more about these cycles and my own, and I wanted a place to continue that journey all in one place. I saw it online and grabbed it up immediately. The cover of the planner I chose is so buttery smooth I let out an audible “Oooo” as I took it out of the plastic, such a pleasant surprise. I am still working through how to use it, maybe I’ll share updates later. Anyway The Personal Journal will hold my musings, affirmations, cycle tracking, thoughts from a book I am reading, notes from the day, etc. This is a book just for me and that’s all it’ll hold, MY stuff.
Here’s how I use a planner for home management.
I use a project planner for my Home Management Planner to track appointments for our family, projects around the house, and homeschool timelines. We have homeschool parent-teacher meetings scheduled in there, birthdays and anniversaries, field trips and travel. Because one side of each spread holds the calendar and the other side is wide open for me, I tend to use the right side differently ever month. Top uses I have found for the right side of the spread:
- budgeting notes
- shopping lists
- packing lists
- projects (home and homeschool)
- field trip planning notes
- quarterly goals
- lesson planning
- quotes
- photos and memories
I’ve used this particular planner for three years now and really enjoy it. It gives me plenty of workspace in a way that I can also see my month ahead. It’s also easy to insert additional pages as needed. They did add some habit trackers this year that I doubt I’ll use but I don’t see us not using this planner next year as well. The shipping cost has gone up ten bucks since I started using it, though, so we’ll see how nutty that gets.
As far as homeschool tracking in this planner, lists also change month to month. I track all of our sick days or outings on the calendar as they pop up. If I do map out a weekly or daily lesson for both students, it’ll be brainstormed in this planner spread. Because I can pop in the inserts, I sometimes just move one from one month to the next if need be. The back of the planner also has project pages that are good for one-off planning or taking a full year’s attendance. There are a couple of pages for yearly reflections that I like to list family joys and accomplishments on.
How do index cards fall in line with all of this?
Because of the nature of this little project, I’d consider it to still be in progress. I may write up an in-depth post on this later but for now here’s the gist of the thing.
I put out a nice little box of index cards in our kitchen where I mix my tea every day. The cards are color coded and split up with dividers. At the applicable time, I pull a card and complete the activity.
Current subjects for the index card system:
- self/individual care
- cleaning
- maintenance
- scheduling
These are pretty broad but a few ideas of what’s on the cards for you:
- wiping down walls and dusting baseboards
- scheduling pest control to spray the front and back yard
- annual car maintenance and registration
- manicures and pedicures for the kiddies
- deep cleaning the fridge and freezer (or the oven 😒)
- sanitizing the washer and dryer
These are things that need to be done but aren’t really daily tasks. They aren’t really regularly completed at all, some are quarterly, monthly or even once or twice per year.
This way I don’t have to keep writing up habit trackers or checking them off my to-do list, but I remember to do them with the index card reminder. This junk doesn’t clog up my to do list, get moved from week to week until I finally complete the task, or worse—completely ignored because it’s written on a list in the front of my bullet journal and I never ever ever go back and refer to it.
Emptying the vacuum comes naturally to me because at a certain point it won’t function as well and I can easily see that it needs to be emptied. Much like taking out the trash, washing the dishes, or scrubbing the bathtub—which will scream at me with crust and filth that cannot be ignored by these eyes. The more “invisible labor” of the home is what I am putting down on these cards.
Since we’ve just moved into a new home and I am learning our style here, this is still a pending project. I find that I add a card or two as I complete the job and move it on back to it’s next home once it’s completed.
Who knows, a full ecosystem might work for you, too.
Five different places to put information sounds daunting even to me now writing about it but I promise it’s made things much easier. Each book has it’s own home so I know where to find it and I can get things out of my mind and where they belong much more seamlessly.
It’s working, somehow.
I guess having a designated space for each area of my life was the key. Trying to shove them all into one home made me uneasy and I never quite figured out a style that worked for me.
Have you tried a similar system or have you been able to find planner peace in one lovely place?
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