Tag: planner

Children’s planners – your feedback please!

front cover of the "My Busy Week" children's planner with text asking for feedback
front cover of the “My Busy Week” children’s planner

I was hoping to have some prototypes for potential new planners for you by now, but for various reasons I haven’t made that happen yet. Before I leap in and start re-formatting things, I thought it might be wise to ask for feedback from those of you who’ve already been using the planner for a year or two, about what you think are its pros and cons. I’ll share my thoughts below, and if you feel like joining me in the comments, that would be really helpful!

eternal magpie My Busy Week children's planner
eternal magpie My Busy Week children’s planner

At the moment, the planner is A4, landscape format, and spiral bound along the short left-hand edge. This means that you can see a week on each A4 page, and you can fold the spiral binding back on itself to leave the book open at the current week.

If I switch to having the planner printed on demand by Amazon it won’t be spiral bound, as they don’t offer that as an option. It also won’t be landscape, as they don’t offer that as an option either. (Why?!)

I could keep it A4, but then the binding would be on the long edge (effectively in the middle)… or I could change it to A5, and have the week as a double page spread. That would make the book smaller, but thicker, as it would have twice the existing number of pages. But whichever I chose, you wouldn’t be able to leave the book open at the current week without squashing the spine, so you’d either need some kind of bookmark, or you’d just have to flick through it to find your place.

Would that be too annoying? I feel as though a paperback binding might not stand up to the rigours of being opened out flat every single day. I also feel as though keeping the book closed, rather than being able to leave it lying around conveniently showing what’s happening this week, might mean that it simply didn’t get used.

So… how do you use your planner?

If you like it exactly as it is, I can leave the current system running, and just place batch orders before the autumn term and again in time for Christmas.

But if there’s anything you’d like to change – whether that’s something about the design, the format, or the convenience of being able to order one at any time of the year, I’d be extremely grateful if you could let me know!

DIY Diary

I freely confess that I am an avid lover of stationery. I have more blank notebooks than is entirely sensible, and I am apparently incapable of sticking to one diary for an entire year. I tried to combat this tendency by buying the most glorious enormous pink Filofax, but even the beautiful leather binder can’t keep me faithful to one diary format.

I’ve tried the Time Management system, the week to view in columns, the week to view with notes, and am currently using a very ambitious page to view, which I’ve been keeping as a sort of a scrapbook.

Over the past year or two I’ve been thinking of making my own diary pages. I’ve looked at the customisable templates over at DIY Planner, thought about hacking a Moleskine, and oooohed over some beautiful planners at Etsy and Little Otsu.

Finally, today, I have bitten the bullet, dusted off my Typography degree, and designed my own planner, which works around the way that I organise my week.

I’ve left enough room down the middle to separate the two pages, and to punch holes so that I can fit them into my binder. I’m not going to print these pages double sided, I plan to use the blank sheets between each week as extra space for writing down notes and ideas.

Once I’ve used the pages for a few weeks, I’ll think about printing them onto nicer paper so that I can use a variety of pens without the ink bleeding through to the other side. I might even consider designing a cover, and putting it up on Lulu, so that other people can use it too. Or perhaps releasing the file as a PDF, so you can print out the pages and use them to make your own planner.