Organizing 2016
I was perusing my old blog to see what I’d written about planners and diaries and discovered that I had written organization posts in both 2014 and 2015. So it seems only right that I post about my 2016 planner setup. For the past four or five years I’ve been using only paper calendars, diaries, and task list systems, no electronic ones, and my class prep has stabilized into paper form as well (I’ve switched back and forth between paper and computer-based notes over the years).
For the third year in a row I’m switching up the type of planner I use. I really liked the bound weekly planner I used last year and I’d intended to use the 2016 version. But the one drawback was that even with 30-minute increments, sometimes I didn’t have quite enough room for all my appointments. My year is shaped by the academic calendar, so I have quite a bit of stuff to write down during the semesters and fewer routine engagements and meetings between them. Within the semesters, though, my administrative responsibilities bunch up in specific weeks, and I can have a dozen appointments in a day. Add to that having to change appointments because students or faculty (or I) suddenly can’t make a scheduled time, and the pages can get really messy and there’s not much room to rewrite in those slots.
I’d used a day-per-page diary in a Filofax a few years ago, but that format winds up being very bulky and you don’t get a good look at the week unless you add in a weekly diary (or it comes included). There are bound A5 diaries that come with monthly, weekly, and daily pages, but I find the A5 too big as a daily carry and again, they get thick and heavy. So I was really intrigued by the Hobonichi, a Japanese planner that comes in both A5 and A6 size, with the A6 also coming in an English version. It’s a daily format, but the paper is Tomoe River, which is very thin while still being fountain-pen friendly (another requirement of mine).
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