September and October have been exceptionally busy months for me. I had a day trip to Chicago, but no other scheduled trips. My busyness came from appointments for my son and mother.

As much as I love technology, I still use a paper planner. I’ve used the Erin Condren Life Planner for 10 months now and I liked it well enough that I ordered a new one for next year. I love the monthly calendar. This is a quick view of my life and very important when doing the call schedule at work. The week pages, those are where I record daily life and To Do’s. I tend to do batching when I work on my Project Life albums, so this is where the planner is particularly helpful. I had been using Oh Life!, but unfortunately as of this month, this service is no longer available. I’ve started using the Day One app, but it hasn’t become a habit yet. That is where my planner has become important. My planner is a habit.

I am typically an organized person, at least that is what people say. I would say I am a neat person that requires things to be written down to be accomplished. For example, I had a parent-teacher conference scheduled for my son. I totally blew the conference. Why? Because I had not written it in my planner. If I don’t write it down, it doesn’t exist. I always had a good memory and a planner was a cute tool to doodle in when I was bored. Now that I have more responsibilities in various aspects of my life, it is essential.

I am grateful that I’ve developed the habit of using a planner. I developed this habit when I was in high school and I’ve used it since. I tried getting rid of the paper and going solely digital, but that just didn’t work for me. I found that I was printing my schedule off so I could see it, and that defeated the purpose of a digital calendar.

This month, Studio Calico has offered a class by Marcy Penner called “Agenda” The class was good and I learned a couple of tips. Though not as earth shattering for me, I would recommend this for people that need to organize their schedule, but they do not have a system. The hardest part of organizing, finding the system that works. This is true if you are organizing appointments, notes, or toys.