My New Planning System

Okay, we got all the components today and made up our planners. Hooray!!

I’m putting a list here of everything that we purchased and where, and then I’ll go into the details, etc.

• Levenger Punch — the most expensive item in the bunch, but if we get several years’ use out of it, should be worth it.
• an Ambi folio — As you can see, this isn’t part of the Circa line. That’s because the folio is meant to hold pads instead of Circa notebooks. However, I sooo wanted a red jacket and couldn’t see myself parting with $70-95+ just for one. Grab this now because I have a feeling they’re discontinuing it. I almost bought either the celery or the grapemist Circa folio because those were on sale. I’m so glad now I waited several days before purchasing because I stumbled upon the Ambi on the site.
• Circa refills — I just got a couple of packs (on sale) of the ones I knew I would put to good use
• the Circa pagefinder
• Rollabind Discs from Marco Paper. These guys are professionals! I called in my order Monday and the discs came today. They don’t have an online ordering system in place yet, but service IS fast. I’m so pleased.

That’s it! I was planning to get the nice eco-friendly discs from Myndology but they don’t sell them separately. Jason, the owner, did offer to throw in some if/when I place an order, but obviously I can’t ask him to give me a bunch for all our needs. So this one will have to wait — what we may end up doing is ordering Myndology books for the boys and Yena while Aisa and I DIY our own — and then using the punch and Rollabind discs to bind the littles’ stuff at the end of the year. We’ll also use the discs for making their scrapbooks, etc.

So here’s what I have now:

Those are the different-sized discs available from Rollabind/Marco Paper. I use the smallest one for my “notebook” that fits into my folio. I made my planner page (the one with the blue background on the right) using Open Office’s Draw program (it’s free!).

Since the Ambi folio is meant to hold pads instead of notebooks, I made a poly folder thingie the size of the cut for the pad, and attached it with masking tape to the last piece of paper (scrap) on my notebook. The poly folder then goes in there like a pad would, but it helps keep my Circa notebook in place. I love my Ambi but I do have one little quibble — it does not have a pen loop! Why that is, I have no idea. I’ll have to develop a mini-hack for that one.

The agenda printout on the left is from Google calendar. I needed to tweak a few things to make Google calendar work for me. As mentioned in an earlier post, I’m trying to get the liturgical year calendar so that it prints out along with my stuff. I added several pre-made calendars into my Google calendar, but I’m still trying to find the right solution for our needs. I just started my own liturgical year calendar which you can view here:

It’s got only a bit of information right now — I plan to update it every couple of weeks or so. Let me know if you’d like to work on it with me:) — it’s shareable to Google account users. The spreadsheet I mentioned in the other post is also shareable — will post that at the end of the month.

To print from Google calendar to any size paper — go to the day’s date, click on “Agenda” then “Print”. This will open up a new window. Adjust your settings; I check off “descriptions” and nothing else. Press “Print” — this will bring up the printing dialogue — click on Properties and adjust your paper settings there. Mine is set for 5.5″ width and 8.25″ length. Google calendar will tell you if your schedule will print on one or more pages, so you can adjust your font (Google only has normal, small, smaller, big, bigger — normal usually works for me unless I’ve got a lot of items then I choose small).

Here’s my planner page in pdf format. Here’s what it looks like up-close:

Since I’ve already got appointments and fixed-time items like lesson plans and field trips on the Google calendar, I opted to place only my essentials on my planner page. Any journal-type writing will be on a separate Circa/DIY page to be inserted onto the right spot when needed. I also have (see first photo) a list of prayer requests on an index card that I can move from day to day so I don’t have to rewrite, I also don’t lose the list, and I’m also able to track answer to prayers (yeah!).

The hearts on the bottom right of my planner page represent each family member — they picked their colors — as a reminder to me to give each one some personal time that day.

The water tracker and fruit/veggie tracker is for me to check off — I’m really bad with this sometimes so I need the visual reminder.

What I love about my Circa system so far: the ability to mix-and-match any size paper. Since the hole-punch isn’t like Franklin’s, I can have small (Compact), medium (Classic) and large (Monarch) pages in one compilation without having to worry about proprietary hole spacing, etc.

What I don’t like about it: cutting the paper, which I’m doing right now with the ol’ scissors! The DIY folks have this trimmer to suggest, but I’ll have to wait for my budget allocation .

So there you have it. Hope that helps!!