Creative journaling and creative planning essentially refer to the same thing: art combined with planning. It is a way of giving more attention, doodles, drawings, lettering, art, watercolor and other artistic elements to your planning pages. Some people glue in various tip ins or cards or pockets or even a scrapbook style page with receipts of tokens from their day. Others use a polaroid camera to take pics and tape them into their planner. You don’t have to be an artist to do creative planning. You just need to think a little bit outside the box of traditional grid and listing styles and add something unique to your day.
Why I love creative planning
I have tried the boxes, I have tried the lists, and I still go back to them here or there when creativity eludes me. But my favourite style of planning is hands down, creative dailies. I love making my planner more than just a planner. I love recording my life, my days, my ups and downs. To look back through it as a reminder of what I did and who I was.
I have found that it improves the structure of my day as well, which might sound a bit crazy if you haven’t tried it. Free flowing, artistic, scripting style plans make me more productive? They do! The reason is that I have spent time on my pages, I invested more than a few seconds to scratch down my plans, I pondered them while I sketched and painted. The more time I spend formulating my thoughts and designing my day, the more relaxed and effective it becomes!
What is scripting?
Scripting is a method of laying out your day in full thoughts, not just bullet points. I love doing it this way for a few reasons.
#1) I can’t fit as many tasks on a page. You guys, when your life is as chaotic as mine… this is golden! I have a tendency to sit down and list enough tasks for a week of full-time work. On top of my full time work of mom-ing, cleaning, cooking, wife-ing, and everything else I do. I am unrealistic. It’s just too easy to write it all down without thought to the time each task will require. When I list, I put it into sentences, I give approximates for time. I evaluate better, I choose a few that I can do well rather than the many that I won’t ever finish.
#2) I complete the thought. Again, I know this sounds a bit strange but bullet points are easier to forget than complete thoughts. Something about writing out the thought process instead of just the task helps me store it in long term memory (at least long enough to get ‘er done).
ie. -clean my room (bullet) vs. -Today I am going to try to organize my clothes, tidy my floor, wash the sheets and make my room nice to surprise Jonathan.
Don’t knock it until you try it!
A peek at some creative planning
A picture says a thousand words so I am going to wrap up the process of creative planning with a pic from my own planner. This shows you both a prepped page as well as a completed page to give you an idea of the full process. I sometimes do my planning for the next day the evening before. I journal out some of my thoughts from the day, some things I want to do the next day, etc.
I have tried it and decided that, for me, it took the time that I rather be able to use on my other creative outlets, like sewing, painting larger pieces, reading/writing, etc.
I do take advantage of other’s creativity by incorporating other artist’s layouts, stickers and the like that fit my personality.
Lastly, not only am I pretty frugal, I like to have my notebooks last as long as possible so that I don’t have to carry the past ones into meetings, to keep up with work projects, etc. I just makes sense for my lifestyle to keep my BUJO fairly cut and dry.
That doesn’t mean that I don’t drool over those that do it!