It’s no secret I love my Plum Paper Planner. It’s a struggle every month to decide what to do with the blank notes pages at the beginning and end of each month. This year, I’m focused on Reflection! Take a look at a few ideas for how to use your notes pages!
With a new year, I got a new planner from Plum Paper. I posted last year about habit tracking and the dashboard I created on the first notes page of a new month, and I really liked that. It was definitely time consuming and took effort to draw the habit tracker I designed every month, but I liked being able to find trends and it made me more aware of my own behavior.
This year, though, I picked a new layout (HORIZONTAL PRIORITIES), which was different than my layout last year, and I added an insert as an extra bonus for each month. This has worked really great for me, but it negates my previous design for the habit tracking I’d been doing on my notes pages.
Here, I’ll show you:
This was the Habit Tracker I’d been using in 2019 at the beginning of every month:
Here’s the new weekly spread & the fitness insert of my 2020 Planner which makes the Habit Tracker Above unnecessary:
Because I have a spot for a habit tracker within the weekly spread and then a health/wellness/fitness tracker at the end of each month I can flip to, I don’t need that original dashboard. This has plagued me for the last month, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with the notes pages now that I don’t need to build my own habit trackers since I had them built into the planner itself. Awesome, but it created a conundrum.
Alas, I figured out a couple of ideas for what I wanted to do, and they all come back to one concept or theme: reflection.
I had been doing a reflection at the end of each month in 2019, but as the year wore on, I found that I’d kind of lost steam on it and it took more time that I was able to give it, so I fell off that wagon. I really loved being able to look back and see what I’d been up to or what had happened over the course of the month, but it just was too much to design & make the spread and then sit there and try to remember what had happened. I wasn’t committed to trying to revive that exact practice for 2020 since I didn’t want to end up quitting on it again. Sometimes, if something isn’t working, it’s okay to go back to the drawing board and try again.
Here’s what I was using last year:
This year, I’m switching it up. I’ve got a few of ideas that I plan on doing:
One Word Each Day:
I’m more likely to find five minutes each day to write something down than have to come back reflect on the month as a whole, so this practice of picking one word each day feels totally manageable. This is the first time I’m giving this a try, so I’ll see how this month goes before I decide to keep doing this. Maybe I won’t do it every month, but I’ll have it as a revolving option. What do you think?
Quote
For the first note page in January, I hadn’t a clue what I wanted to do. Now that I had figured out what I wanted to try to maintain for February, it was too late to do it for January since it has come and gone already, so I found this quote/graphic I liked from Jenessa Wait and I dropped it onto my notes page. After I did it in pen, I decided I didn’t really like my execution but it is what it is 😂.
Dinner Trends
I have a place on my weekly spread that has a place for me to write in what we had for dinner, and this helps with meal planning. I also like being able to look back and see what we ate for dinner – I don’t know why, but I do. I figured having all of our dinners in the month in one place will be a quick way for me to identify trends of our regular favorites and help me jog my memory when I feel like I’m in a rut. For instance, in January, I already know that we ate waaaay too much takeout – well, way more than I’d care to admit to anyone else 😂. Over time, this will likely prove to be more helpful than just having one month to look back on. I did this for January, and I plan on doing it for February too. Thoughts?
How are you using your notes pages this year? Have you seen any cool examples online of what other people are doing? Let me know what your ideas are by tagging @glimpseatgrace on social media! If you liked this post, share it with your friends!
