Confessions of a Planner Addict

The last time I went to the CHA trade show, way back in January of 2016, something rather unexpected happened...I caught the planner bug. Blame it on the high of being surrounded by paper and stickers for days (it's like a sugar rush, a caffeine kick, and an adrenaline high at the same time), or on my being exhausted into a highly suggestible state (quite possibly caused by staying up a bit too late to catch that one last ride at Disneyland with the ever fabulous May Flaum right before the show started), but when I wandered into that Me and My Big Ideas booth and spotted all the new Happy Planners, I was instantly hooked.

I'm no stranger to MAMBI- I've loved their embellishments for years and raved about their journaling cards and Project Life-style pocket pages a few years ago. Until that fateful day when I walked into their booth, though, I had pretty much been blocking out all things planner and had completely missed out on the magic that is their disc bound system. I loved the idea of the simple laminated covers (though you can certainly have a fancy, plush cover if you want one!), and the mix of utility and style in their pages. As soon as my local store got the planners in stock, I rushed out to get my very first one.

Fast forward to now, and I currently use several Happy Planners at once. I only keep plans in one of them, and the others are pretty much fancy notebooks and trackers. My catch-all planner is a Classic size with a vertical layout, and it's where all of my appointments and scheduling items go. My life is actually kind of light on appointments (and heavy on to-dos, which I'll get to in a minute), so I tend to deck this one out a bit more than some of the others.

For instance, this week I went nuts with all the Halloween goodness! (The planner itself is the Squad Goals design from their release earlier this year.)

I keep track of all of those to-dos that I mentioned earlier in a Classic size planner with a Horizontal layout. (This planner is one from the 2017 release and will be over at the end of this year. I've already picked up another horizontal to take its place starting in January!)

I tend to fill these pages up pretty much completely every week as items pop up. Honestly, this planner probably helps save my sanity, and I try to brain dump into it every night before I go to bed so I don't have a list swirling around in my mind all night.

And then there is the planner that I use for a fitness tracker (the Hand Drawn Whimsy design, which stole my heart as soon as I saw the preview).

This planner isn't strictly necessary, and once upon a time I wouldn't have needed extra motivation to keep me working out. But in the last few years we've had some major life changes- I started my own business and eventually quit my software job to run it full time. Darren started and graduated from medical school and is now in residency, which also meant that we moved to another state (and towed my business along with us!). I still love working out and staying fit, but having this planner to fill up with my workouts and health stats gives me just a little bit of extra motivation- like getting to put a gold star on the calendar every day. :)

I have sections of all of these planners Frankenplanned into one binder, so I'm not jumping around between multiple books. I'll try to do a video soon showing that setup! (Because, yes, I finally feel like getting back to doing videos and have my setup at the new house ready to go!)

I also have been toying off and on with MAMBI's Happy Memory Keeping system for a year or so, as well, and things have finally settled out enough recently for me to find my groove with it. I already do Project Life, and I didn't want to just replicate that same information again in a planner format. Instead, I'm going to use it to tell 1-2 stories each week in a super simple layout format (think Heidi Swapp Storyline), and I may go back to past years to catch up on some stories that I don't quite want to do a full layout on, but still want to get into an album. I'll be sharing some of that here, too!

This post is really just a long and rambling way of saying that you'll be starting to see some planner stuff here! It won't be all planners, all the time, because I definitely still scrapbook, and I still make cards, and I still make spreads in my traveler's notebooks- I basically embrace all forms of scrapbooking and memory keeping and am excited for the additional ways that I can use planners to meet those goals!