The Right Planner

Day Timer.

Day Planner.

Day Minder.

Day Runner.

Desktop calendars.

Page-a-day calendars.

Daily, weekly, monthly. At-a-glance. Organize. Task notes. Calendar. Contact list. Phone numbers.

Sketch books that pretend to be planners. Planners on your computer. Calendars in Google. Microsoft Outlook.

So many ways to plan and take care of our day. Be on time. Be here. Be there. Do this. Do that.

Write it in Evernote. Or OneNote. Or an Excel chart.

File it.

Pile it.

Toss it.

Scan it.

Use the software in your phone/tablet/computer. Hope you don't lose it.

Write it on a scrap of paper, and hope you don't lose it.

Amazon offers you 2,700 ways to go about organizing your life. You can do it in all colors and by the school year, if you want.

You can do it for a single year, five years or whatever else strikes your fancy (use blank pages and you can chart out your whole life).

A friend of mine told me last week she had a life plan that took her up to age 99. I didn't say anything, but boy, that is some planning.

What do you do when something unexpected happens if you plan like that?

Google gives you 59,600,000 results for "day organizers." That's millions. Millions of ways to organize your seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years.

I have gone through a number of various planners in my lifetime. I've used all of the main brand names - some I find too strict, some not strict enough. Some don't give me enough lines. Some are too big, some too small. Some don't have enough extras, some have too many.

Some come with refills, others don't.

They come in large sizes and small sizes. Some are big notebooks. Some are half-notebook sized. Some fit in your pocketbook or pants pocket. Some are like briefcases.

What I use now for appointments is a combination of a pocket calendar that I carry with me and a 2003 version of the Microsoft Outlook with calendar. I put them together once a week to sync them up, and print out a monthly calendar. The monthly calendar stays at my desk and I write appointments on there as I make them from home. Then I transfer them into the computer

It is tedious and multi-stepped, and probably more effort than I need to put out. But I don't have a smart phone to worry about losing, and this is what has evolved to meet my needs over time.

But other planning - life goals planning, that sort of thing? It's just in my head. No solid dreams written down - nothing that says "See the Grand Canyon again" or "Visit Scotland" or "Visit the museum home of every writer you can find" or whatever it might be that I sometimes think of doing. Things that I know I will never do, anyway.

That would be a goal planner, wouldn't it. There are 46 million goal planners listed on Google. That's a lot of different ways to work out your life goals.

I didn't ask my friend who has her life planned out to age 99 how she worked that out. Maybe I should give her a call, and see what she used for that. Maybe there is a 100-year-plan life journal goal-setting date planner out there somewhere.

I need a new planner. But I want one I can do lots of things in, not just set dates. So I guess I need to go look at these millions of planners and see if there is one that might suit me.

But then again, maybe I need to stop worrying about planning, and just let life unfold. Because some things you just can't plan for.

What about you? How do you plan? Or do you plan at all?