Why You Should Be Using a Life Planner

If you already know how to successfully use a life planner, then I don’t need to tell you how it’s changed your life. How it keeps all the little details from slipping through the cracks. How it has allowed you to get all the things done and make sure you have time to take care of yourself and nurture your relationships. That’s what getting organized, planning, and using your executive functioning (aka “adulting”) skills can do for you.

But if you don’t have a life planner or you have one but it sits somewhere unopened, unused, and unwritten in…this post is for you.

I’ve been working with clients for over 25 years to help people get healthy habits started and established, to learn how to successfully manage chronic mental health and health conditions, and to learn better how to “adult.” One of the easiest and most effective ways to support all of these is with the use of a daily life planner.

It’s better than a journal.

Better than a calendar.

Better than your phone.

The Blank Slate is Your Life

What a life planner does for you is provide the blank slate, which is Your Life or Time. What you want to do with that is up to you. You can be passive about it, or you can be active or proactive in your life and with your time. Staying on top of all of the life tasks that are required to be successful in your job or career, your relationships, your mental health and health takes being active and proactive.

While there are several calendars and organizers you can use online, I still recommend that you have a physical life planner that you open each day so that you can see where you are in time and can literally get your “hands on” your life.

If you are attempting to get a healthy habit established, or break an unhealthy one, using a life planner is one of the most effective ways to do it, as you can track your progress daily, weekly, and monthly very easily. You can build in rewards and consequences for yourself. The time-tested technique of making one small change each week, consistently, becomes sustainable powerful change. That is just pare of the magic of the life planner.

So Many Options!

There are so many options out there to choose from. Some of the most popular include The Happy Planner, The Panda Planner, and the one I have used for the last several years, The Erin Condren Planner, among others.

Personalizing or customizing your life planner can be as simple as adding in your schedule and personal goals. Or you may want to take it to the next level and take advantage of all of the thousands of ways to customize which include reminder and decorative stickers. Seasonal designs, Harry Potter, emojis, or original artwork. Your life planner then also becomes a way to express yourself and your own way of being in the world.

I can teach you how to use a life planner to get organized, stay on track with healthy habits, find patterns or trends in your life that you may want to change, or just help make life more manageable.