A New Planner

So I have been using the ARC Planner system for a while now, and I still LOVE LOVE LOVE the disk bound system.  All of my notebooks are now mostly bound with disks.  MAMBI has come out with their version of a planner, the Create 365 Happy Planner.  Their web site is here.  I decided that I wanted to try it out, and I bought one.  I thought I would do a post about it, and what I like about it.

If you are interested you can go to the site and see the pages for yourselves, if you haven't already seen this planner system.  It is similar to the Erin Condren and other vertical planning systems.  I have wanted to check them out, thinking that they would be cool.  The days are divided up into three sections, Morning, Afternoon and Evening.  For someone who is super busy and has a lot of job deadlines and kids going to and fro, it would be awesome to plan out an entire day. For me, not so much.  I don't have a lot of variation in my routine.  I have the same days off.  I don't have meeting but once a week, at the same time.  I am empty nesting, so I don't have kids at home to shuffle around.  So this doesn't really work for me.

I decided to create strips of stickers on my Silhouette to cover up the headings of the boxes, and make my own boxes.  The top was for appointments.  You can see it's pretty bare.  The middle I made my specific things to do on that particular day.  The bottom I left open for anything else extra.  I used stickers from MAMBI to decorate it.  The "to do" stickers for checking off tasks I made on my Silhouette.  I've seen a lot of these online for free, to print and use for personal use.  I have them pinned on my Pinterest board "I'm a Planner Geek", if you want to check it out.

I don't know if I am just used to my old planner pages or what, but I don't really think the vertical planner style is for me.  I decided to try a different style for this month (July) and give it a go.  I designed my own pages for the Happy Planner, using the top two boxes as I did above, but also having a huge note section on each of the pages to do with as I please.  I added my daily checkbox for my exercise, meds, etc.  I also added a Menu Idea spot to jot those ideas down.  I usually buy stuff for the week, then pick and choose as the mood suits me, so meals aren't always assigned to a specific date.  I used planner sticker printables I found on the web,  and you can find the links in my Pinterest board.

So far, if I am going to use a vertical planner style, I would do this one.  Also, I do not like that the planner pages that come with the Happy planner start with Monday.  I am used to, and want, my planner weeks to start with Sunday, just like the monthly calendar does.  (I LOVE MAMBI's  MONTHLY CALENDARS!!!)  Also, since I designed the pages, I can customize them however I want to.  Nice.

 I am so picky about my planners.  Aren't we all?  I don't like that the weekly spread starts on the back of the monthly planner, so I just covered it up with a piece of notebook paper and used washi tape to decorate it.  Now I have extra not pages for the month if I need them.  I could do a gratitude journal for the month here, for example, or keep track of coupon savings, whatever I want.  I did the same with the back of the page that has the next months summary.

 For August, I am going to use my old system that I resized for the new planner.  The pages are 9 1/4" high by 6 7/8" wide.  And, by the way, the ARC punch works great with this planner…you just have to trim added pages by 1/8" on the width because the punches on the purchased pages have longer "tails" that fit on the disks than the ARC punch does.

For the Month of August I decided to just cover up the headings of the boxes with decorative tape, and I added strips of graph paper above them to cover up the dates.

Have you looked at this planner?  What do you think?

Stay crafty, my friends!