My planning tools and creating your perfect planner

I personally absolutely love a to do list and a planner. Over the past couple of years I have found that I am repeating my lists in multiple places, for example my calendar and reminders are in Google Calendar but I also write them down in my paper planner.

I love writing to do lists in notebooks such as packing lists for upcoming trips or as I’m currently planning my wedding I have a lot of lists for that event. I then tend to replicate those lists in an app called Asana as I’m in it every day for work.

Asana is fantastic piece of software that is completely free and you can either access it through their website or through the app. I tend to use the website to organise my work tasks but then when I think of things I need to remember when I’m at home I can use the app to update it. It is separated into a work section where you can share tasks with coworkers and add due dates and a personal section that only you can see.

I also use it for scheduling recurring tasks that I need to remember such as cleaning. I can write a task such as clean oven grill trays and then set a repeating period so once I’ve ticked it off it will automatically reset to a fortnight after that.

I do like a planner for future planning though and to remind myself of things like my partners work schedule and my sons activities. I wanted a digital planner that I could use my iPad or iPhone to update and I did buy one from Jordan Page at funcheaporfree as I love her block schedule planning method but I didn’t find it covered everything I needed as it’s an undated planner there wasn’t calendars for months or years.

I use a website called Canva which is free and brilliant for creating all sorts of designs including A4 documents, posters, social media posts, invitations etc; I used Canva to create my perfect planner and download it as a PDF. I used the website Calendaropia to snippet or screen shot calendars for the years and months.

You can create a document up to 100 pages so I have created a planner that has two daily pages to one A4 sheet so if I printed it the planner would be A5 in size. I have kept blocks to continue to follow Jordan Page’s block schedule method but adapted it to include a big section for to dos, the main goal for my day and the meals for that day.

Use Canva to create your own planner and you can download it as a print PDF with bleed and crop marks so you could even get it professionally printed and bound if you require a paper planner. Alternatively you can do what I’m going to do and use the PDF to use on the Books app on an iPad so I can still write notes on it using my Apple Pencil.