Tutorial: Setting Up Your Planner for the Week | Marcy Penner

I'm a daily planner girl. All the way. To help in my weekly planning, I use a weekly planner. It helps me lay out the days of the week and keep them balanced. It's also the perfect amount of space for decorating. My number one goal in using a planner is to keep track of to-dos and other things. Function. By keeping my decorating simple, I'm still able to enjoy the planning aspect of my planner while making use of my stash at the same time.

Today, I'm going to walk you through how I use and decorate my planner.

Every Sunday I sit down with my weekly planner. Right now I'm using a vertical format.

I'll take a look at the monthly calendar for the month and transfer any important details and events onto the correct days of the current week. If it's something interesting or fun I'll usually highlight by using letter stickers or stamps. For example, on Tuesday my boys were going to a sleepover. If that doesn't require fancy gold letter stickers then I don't know what does.

I love using stamps to draw my attention to important details as well. Here I'm using an "important" stamp as a subtitle for a reminder that the builders were coming that day.

I continue filling up my page with events and to-dos that have to happen on a specific day. I added a stamped rating under the sleepover so we could give that a thumbs up or down when the boys got home. I highlighted "date night" and my daughter's day at work with stickers as well. And lastly, a civic holiday was noted with a gold label.

Note: I like to use highlighters for color coding specific tasks in my planner as well.

This is pretty much where my planner sits on Sunday night. Important stuff written down and recorded. Just a couple of embellishments. This part of my evening takes maybe 10 minutes. Totally doable.

Now, after my week is planned I focus on my individual days. Every night (or sometimes early evening) I'll take a few minutes and write down something that happened, add a photo or decorate the day. I'll also get the next day ready by adding any to-dos or additional things that need to happen tomorrow.

I'll repeat this every night so that I can go to bed knowing that I know what's up for the next day.

So, gradually my planner will fill up as the week goes on. Things will get added here and there. Something will get stamped. A sticker will get added. Nothing super time-consuming or intense.

My decorations are an accent. I HAVE to be able to tackle tasks...or really, a planner is pointless to me. Simple embellishing and decorating as the day goes on seems to be working very well in keeping that balance between paper crafter and planner.

Supplies: Gold letter stickers, speech bubble stickers and stamps - Pop Art Planner kit; labels - Haring; Office Stamp Set; Everyday Tasks Stamp Set; Study On Stamp Set; Grub On Stamp Set; pink alphabet stickers - Pop Art Project Life kit; Flamingo Color Theory Ink; Onyx Black Versafine Ink Pad