Day 89

Sometimes, it is helpful to be reminded that most people are not automatically good at everything they try. For me, I received that reminder about myself this evening when I tried to deck out my planner. Fortunately, I quickly remembered that other people have failed at things (Cake Wrecks, anyone?) and had a reassuring laugh at their misfortune. 

In college, I purchased a planner for $10-$15 at Walmart. I color coded my classes with different colored highlighters, and I found that to be tremendously helpful for visualizing which classes were going to take the most time in a given week. I also had My Little Pony and Kung Fu Panda stickers to put on my planner pages when I had a major assignment or test as a way to make that item look fun and exciting. That was a great system for me, but now we live in a different age of planners and planning. Planning is a lifestyle. Meanwhile, I don’t know what to do with Washi tape, but I know it looks pretty. I just don’t know how to get to that point. 

Tonight, I started my fresh planner journey with highlighters, colored pens, stickers unique to my planner, stickers I’ve just accumulated in life, my work schedule for next week, and a pile of printed syllabi, and I thought I was ready to make an adorable planner. Unfortunately, I did not anticipate the struggle I was going to have with transferring my Outlook calendar to the paper one, so I had to white out stuff I wrote on the wrong day, not once, but twice. But it really is okay. I am going to get the hang of it eventually, and I’ll be making planner pages that wow. I might even buy some Washi tape. Hopefully, my life will actually be organized too; that’s certainly a desired outcome. 

The good news about my hot mess planner is that this is the early stage, and I have plenty of stickers that I can add to make my week look awesome, white out be damned. The other good news is that I don’t think I have any one week that is too terrible as far as papers, assignments, and/or tests in all of my classes. No week looks easy, but there is no week that I can point to at this moment and say, “Here’s where I might have a breakdown!” or “There will be no sleep this week.” I am going to do my best to stay on top of my work so it stays that way. 

Something that made today great: My computer is working again! I went ahead and ordered a new one, but it won’t be here until the end of next week, so I’m glad to have my current one for now.