We’ve talked about digital journaling and favorite paper planners, but not for a while, so let’s discuss: what does your ideal planner or journal look like? Do you have preferences for some plans to be on paper, in the cloud, or in a specific program?

{related: here’s our 2012 discussion on the ideal planner/calendar}

I have bought soooo many journals over the years (not to mention attempts to track habits and reward myself for streaks!), that I kind of surprised myself a few days ago by really wanting a bullet journal that I could take from place to place with me and scribble in with pen.

Then I started thinking about what I would want in my bullet journal — what I’ve seen in other journals an planners — and what I’ve adapted on my own for my digital bullet journal.

For example: I really like the weekly plan I was using in my digital journal where I consider meals for the week, goals, to-dos, a few thoughtwork type questions (gratitude, what am I doing right, how can I make a 1% change to be better).

I’ve also collected a ton of journal prompts from various diet, writing, and other programs I’ve done over the years — as well as vision plan type stuff for the year ahead and ways to assess the year behind me.

Something that has not been terribly useful in my life is hour-by-hour planners or even month-by-month planners — I vastly prefer to keep any appointments or things like that in Google calendar, where I can set up automatic reminders as well as easily share data with my husband and caregivers for the kids.

In short, I’ve come up with a far too ambitious plan to FrankenPlan a journal or planner I’ll print at LuLu for myself using a lot of that stuff but leave open sufficient pages for free writing. (We’ll see if it actually happens, ha..)

The Setup for My Ideal Planner and Journal

So far, the index for my ideal planner looks like this — note that I tend to consider both the front and back of a journal to be prime real estate, so some important/oft-used stuff might be at the end.

• Weekly Plan / Meal Plan / Assessment / Regular thoughtwork — I would also put some habit trackers here, and others might go in the monthly section. I also keep notes on spending in the weekly section.
• Monthly Planner/Assessment – Goals, tasks, memories, challenges, etc. Some progress/habit trackers would go here too.
• Future Log – a space to record things coming up in the future, whether repetitive (pay estimated taxes) or specific (plan a nice birthday for my dad’s 75th!).
• Corporette calendar – For years I’ve kept content ideas by month/time of year, but it’s on my computer. It would be nice to have it in paper form as well. (We also keep a lot of story ideas in Slack… which saves them to Trello… and it all gets a bit confusing.)
• Recipe Reviews, my huge spreadsheet of possible recipes by theme, and space for scribbled assessments of what I need to use or cook soon. (I tend to just save recipes-to-try to my various social media accounts — but sometimes I go through them and try to condense them all in one list.)
• Books – I like to record which books I’ve read or listened to, as well as favorites from the year.
• Shows and Movies – I also like to record which shows I’ve watched and any pertinent thoughts, as well as keep a running list of movies and shows to see.
• Lessons learned
• Journal (lots of empty pages for daily / thoughts / whatever)
• Notes on workouts — if I’m doing a recording from Les Mills or whatever I like to record what the number is and what my opinion of it was (usually something insightful like “too many pushups”).
• And (at the very back) my yearly workout tracker, with more space for other specific goal-related trackers

How about you, readers? What does your ideal planner or bullet journal set up look like? What do you prefer to write down on paper versus keep in the Cloud or a specific program? If you do use multiple programs (e.g., Evernote, OneNote, Outlook, Google Keep/Calendar/Docs, Daylio, Done, Slack, Trello, etc), how do you parse what goes into which program?