the planner that will solve my life

very own specific brain,

                January 12, 2024

            the planner that will solve my life

                new year, same brain

            In 2021, my increasingly desperate annual quest to find the Perfect Planner(TM) came to its (probably inevitable) conclusion: I gave up. 
You want something that’s gonna work for your very own specific brain, you kinda gotta do it yourself, ya know?
I’ve been making my own planners every January for a few years now, taking some inspiration from the bullet journal movement without adopting the format wholesale (because a lot of it doesn’t work for my brain). Here’s a peek inside this year’s journal, with some notes at the end of the post about my decision-making process behind the various elements.
starting off with a very basic year-at-a-glance
every month has one of these cute cover pages. I just reuse the same ones every year because honestly… good enough.
not interesting, but important! this is where I write my homework assignments. 90% of my planner is these spreads.
Okay now we’re getting into the fun stuff! 
trackers section title page courtesy of my tiny pocket wolf (this is a joke but I wish it wasn’t)
I fucking love SOUP. On the left page I’ll list every kind of soup I make this year, and on the right page I’ll highlight any new soup recipes I try. The goal (obviously) is to make 12 new soup recipes this year that I’ve never made before. A new soup a month? Very doable. Also thank you to my housemate Ollie for the soup stickers.
For every book I read in 2024 I get to color in a spine on the bookshelf, and then on the right page I’ll track the titles. I usually read at least 50 books in a year (not counting children’s picture books; I read a few hundred of those), and there are 64 blank spines on that shelf — now taking bets for how close I’ll get to filling it in completely without going over that number. 
A couple of basic health trackers. My menstrual cycle tracker is called a werewolf tracker because life is too short to not make silly little jokes about banal things that are, objectively, kind of horrifying. 
Stretch goals (alternatively titled Don’t Fuck Up Your Body) is my sticker chart for remembering to do my warmup stretches before I sit down and inevitably hunch myself into a shrimp-backed swamp goblin for hours and hours at my drawing desk. Comic pages counter is exactly what it says on the tin: I get a sticker for every comic page I complete, tracked monthly.
In setting up a planner, here are my basic rules:
function over aesthetics. Ultimately it needs to be useable. 90% of this thing is just month-by-month planner pages with literally nothing fancy about them. I didn’t spend a long time using different colored pens or elegant handwriting styles or innovative page designs; it’s mostly just a dying black micron, a ruler, and math. Plus, if I made it too pretty, I’d spook myself and wouldn’t use it. (The tracker pages are a little more ✨aesthetic✨, but even those are designed first with utility in mind, and on the spectrum of minimalism to maximalism in bullet journal world, they’re fairly ascetic.)
flexibility. The prepunched pages that I can remove and reorganize are SO helpful for my brain, because it gives me a way to change things if they’re not working or I don’t like them. And I can add more pages if, say, I fill up my soup tracker and it’s only June, or I decide I want to track something new or in a different format. Similarly, the trackers are not based on rigid or difficult goals; mostly they are spaces for record-keeping. 
selectivity. I specifically chose these trackers — and only six of them, not like, dozens — because they are things I’m genuinely invested in. Each one will either be fun (soup, books), useful (headaches and hormone cycles), or motivating (habit-building a stretching routine, following through on finishing comic pages) for me to track. If you’re making your own planner, don’t let bujo pinterest boards fool you into taking on trackers you don’t care about. For me, it works better to approach tracking as an exercise in curiosity: how many did I do in a year, not how many can I do, and more importantly, what were they. 
low-effort maintenance. The trackers are all designed to be really, really easy to use. Dot stickers, a few different gel pen colors, write the name of the thing — that’s it. January Maia is not Rest Of The Year Maia; future me is not going to want to be creative in here or do anything that takes longer than 30 seconds. All the design work (features, layout, spot illustrations, etc.) has to be done at the initial setup. The rest of the year is just coasting. 
Happy new year, be kind to your brain, and thanks for being here. Accepting book and soup recommendations at this time. If it’s got mushrooms I am 80% more likely to actually try it. (This goes for both categories.)

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