ANOTHER INSTALLMENT

In yet another installment of What The Internets Is Trying to Sell Me, I bring to you planners. I’m still getting tons of car camping and camper van ads, but coming in hot right now are all the various ways I can journal and plan my way through 2026. But wait! They’re not just daily planners. They’re scrap books and goal books and coloring books and journals all wrapped up in one easy to cary book. Some of them even come with stickers! It’s like the internet just noticed that I’ve been spending this year juggling three different calendars and decided that I needed to add another calendar to make my life more organized. I was lured in at first. I won’t lie. Seeing these images of beautifully curated journal entries with pictures and drawings all corresponding to that particular day, made my heart leap in my chest with a belief that I could do that. I could sit and journal with pretty colored pencils and neat handwriting. I have time and patience to do this and stay on top of this for an entire year. This will make me be more creative while being more organized.

Then I had my Cher in Moonlight moment and came to my senses.

I have a calendar attached to my work email and all work related things are there, but I also put work related things in my Google calendar, which is bit more user friendly than the work one. I’ve got things color coded with red for work, yellow for social events and purple for health and body related appointments. This calendar is linked up to my Apple calendar on my phone, which is sometimes easier for me get to when I’m quickly needing to add something. I also have a dry-erase calendar that fill out every month with stuff that both Michael and I are doing so he has an easy visual of why I may not be home. This month, I drew silly little turkeys on some of the blocks. That’s creative. For the most part, all of this is working for me and I do not miss appointments or forget that I have to run a batch of fifty slides on the new microscope. The dry-erase calendar is probably over kill, especially since I usually have to tell Michael every day that I will be out of town starting the week before going out of town. The times when this doesn’t work for me are usually those days where I have said “yes, I can do this for you” one too many times and have filled may day with back to back to back commitments. This is not a failure of my calendar.

This is a failure to set boundaries.

Those ads I’m getting for the journal/planners offend me. First of all, stop trying to capitalize on my anxiety. Secondly, don’t assume that I am unorganized or uncommitted to goals. Thirdly, my life doesn’t need to be hyper organized, and fourthly, I don’t have the time or patience to make a beautifully curated journal/planner. I have always been disappointed with the outcome from an attempt at artful journaling, with the exception of the Fortune Cookie journal where I filled the pages with tiny stories of fiction. I have many many notebooks where the pages are filled with yoga classes. I always write out an outline for each class I teach. Now that I have an iPad with an Apple pen, I write those outlines in an app and this has worked well for me for years. In the early years, those outlines included stick figures doing poses. This is probably why I’ve never thrown those notebooks away. Many years from now, when the Cabbage has to sort through all my crap, they’re going to find at least five notebooks filled with stick figures doing yoga, like hieroglyphs.

They for sure will not find years of artfully journaled planners.