{"id":15470,"date":"2011-04-02T02:21:00","date_gmt":"2011-04-02T06:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/hameblog\/2011\/04\/02\/a-change-of-planner\/"},"modified":"2025-09-12T07:50:16","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T10:50:16","slug":"a-change-of-planner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/2011\/04\/02\/a-change-of-planner\/","title":{"rendered":"A change of planner"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the start of the year, I made a new planner for myself. After using it for a full quarter, I realised it wasn’t really working for me.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

For one, I accidentally mis-counted the pages I’d need and filled it with two<\/em> years’ worth of weekly pages. That made it awfully bulky.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

More problematic, though, was that I’d divided the page up into blocks for each day of the week. As I used the book, I found myself scribbling notes from my weekly review in the margins and clipping a to-do list onto the page. What’s the point of having a custom planner if you have to stick notes to it?<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

So this week, in addition to making a bunch of little books (I’m almost finished everything for the Alternative Press Fair!), I made myself a new diary.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

<\/figure>\n

<\/a>This one’s thinner, and I incorporated my own end-papers this time, made using inks and stamps. I kept the additional sections at the back (Follow-up, Thoughts, Projects), but overhauled the calendar page to work the way that, it turns out, I actually use them.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The original:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

And the new version (with added colour, because colour is nice):<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

It turns out I don’t really have many daily items to fill in, but I do have a lot of things I’m working on, so now there are sections for projects as well as the little tasks\/to-dos that don’t belong to a project. Plus, there’s a section for the thematic\/philosophical stuff I want to remember for the week.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

This last part usually comes out of a kooky little exercise I do called “Weekly Review at the Imaginary Diner”, where I sit down in a roadside caf\u00e9 in my mind and talk with three different experts each week about the things I’m working on or struggling with.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

I realise this is all made up, but I find it incredibly helpful and insightful. As in my novel-writing, I’ve come to discover that my subconscious and my imagination are a lot smarter than my day-to-day mind — or at least work more holistically and are less reactive.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The great thing about learning DIY skills is that you can create custom-made tools to suit every single purpose.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The bad thing about learning DIY skills is that you can create custom-made tools to suit every<\/em> single purpose.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

<<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

p>
<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the start of the year, I made a new planner for myself. After using it for a full quarter, I realised it wasn’t really working for me. For one, I accidentally mis-counted the pages I’d need and filled it with two years’ worth of weekly pages. That made it awfully bulky. More problematic, though, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15470"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15470\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}