How I Use A Planner for Purposeful Leadership and Life
When I was in high school and college, planners were issued to students each year. Under the guise of keeping us organized, they also served as hall passes and a repository for student conduct policies. The layout was the same—monthly overviews followed by daily or weekly spreads, each day broken into 1 hour or 30 minute increments. The empty pages were begging for me to fill in every minute of every day with… plans.
I spent fifteen years after graduating from college planning my time. Filling my days. And often, failing to achieve the plans I put in place. Yes, I may have 16 waking hours each day, but after accounting for 50 hours of work/commuting and 14 hours of eating and showering I would try to schedule the remaining 48 hours each week with activities only to learn that time really didn’t work that way for me. (I’m not the only person who tried to “maximize productivity” like this, right?)
I love to make plans. But it’s demoralizing to see so many plans unfulfilled. So many planners were abandoned just a few months into the year. Only in my late thirties did I realize schedule-based planners weren’t for me. I, like most leaders, have a digital calendar that is constantly in flux and often planned months in advance. My planner (yes, I use a paper planner) doesn’t include most of my appointments. It’s a tool for intention setting and follow-through.
My planner is not a schedule. It’s a purpose-driven guide for how I want to live my life. Each day, it helps me increase my self awareness and move closer to reaching or clarifying my goals. I’ve cultivated a practice of annual self-reflection and goal setting, supported by weekly time spent reviewing how I can live the next seven days aligned with my purpose. I usually do this on Sundays, although I find it’s also helpful to take time on Friday afternoon to jot down any thoughts I want to carry into the next work week so I can cast them aside for the weekend.
Each day, I try to write down something that I want to remember when I review my progress in the future. This may be an accomplishment, important event, how I was feeling, questions I had, or something I learned. Reviewing these notes at the end of a quarter or year not only highlights the progress I’ve made towards goals—it also uncover patterns of thinking that I may not have been aware of at the moment.
The blank pages at the back of my planner are a hodgepodge of lists and notes about all areas of my life: meal plans, notes from my leadership coaching sessions, business planning, vacation ideas, garden planning, etc. Flipping through them not only helps me find things I want to remember, it’s a reflection of a life well-lived.
In February 2021, I started a fresh planner and set 25 one-year goals in a variety of areas of my life. I know 25 may sound daunting, but they were all achievable. I’m writing this on February 1, 2022 and I’m proud that I’ve achieved 17 of them. These include developing a 3-day-a-week yoga practice, returning to accurate personal budget tracking and planning, building a 3-year growth plan for my business, documenting our culture, reading 20 books, and eliminating knee pain when I walk on the stairs. I will build on the goals I achieved, and revisit/revise those I didn’t. Just a glimpse at my 2022 vision board reminds me of my intentions for the year.
Planner Recommendations
I invite you to join me in purposeful planning. I’ve found two tools particularly helpful in this journey, and perhaps you will too.
Planning Once A Year
If you’re not ready to commit to daily/weekly planning, the YearCompass is a wonderful tool for annual purpose development and visioning. For several years I dedicated a day to completing this free workbook, reviewing the most recent year and planning for the year ahead. It helped me let go of ideals I was holding onto that weren’t serving me, and adjust my mindset to become more of the person I was meant to be, not who I felt I had to be. (Special thanks to Josie Ahlquist who first shared this tool with me.)
Ongoing Planning
For three years I’ve been using a Clever Fox Planner (special thanks to Beth Miller who shared it with me in 2019). There are many versions of this planner, and my favorite is the Pro Weekly. One of the best aspects of this version is it’s undated; you can start at any point in the year that works for you and just fill in the monthly and weekly spreads with the correct dates as you go. If you need to take a break from purposeful planning (say, during the busy garden/harvest season, or for the birth of a child), you can pick up where you left off without wasting pages.
Why I think the Clever Fox Planner is the best planner for leaders:
- Ongoing self-reflection clarifies purpose
- Integrates all aspects of your life, not just work
- Annual, quarterly, monthly, and weekly goal intentions and progress
- Focus on purpose, not a schedule
- Cultivates behaviors that support the life you want
- Flexible undated formats accommodate all life’s obstacles
Self-reflection is a critical leadership practice, and the Clever Fox planner prompts you to reflect regularly. The first pages are dedicated to awareness and self-discovery, daily rituals, a vision board, and a twenty year visioning exercise. Completing all of these pages requires honest self-inquiry and a significant time commitment. It’s ok if you don’t complete them all right away, but I encourage you to work through them throughout the year. Even the vision board (I finally made one this year and surprisingly enjoyed the scissors + magazines + glue exercise).
The visioning exercise supports another critical leadership practice: balance. “Business and career” is just one of eight categories you’re asked to consider when crafting a vision for your life. You’ll also consider health and fitness, family and friends, relationships and romance, finance, personal development, fun and recreation, and spirituality. After looking ahead twenty years, you’re asked to identify one-year goals in each life area and why you want to achieve it. I love the focus on the why.
From here, you zoom in further. Quarterly goals, supported by monthly goals, and then further into the planner, weekly goals. At these levels, you’re encouraged to identify rewards for each goal that’s achieved. It seemed silly to me at first, but now I like identifying a weekly reward for accomplishing my main goal. Sometimes I buy myself something, otherwise I commit to a favorite dinner, or a long bath.
The weekly spreads are where I spend most of my time. The well-organized grid has places for your priorities, work and personal to-do lists, habits you’re trying to cultivate and skills you’re trying to learn, a “life balance to-do list” that encourages you to think about non-work areas of your life, prompts to start the week with what you’re excited about, and to close the week with wins, lessons learned, and opportunities to improve. Each day offers just a few lines for notes, a core goal, and three priorities.
Make Planning Fun With Stickers
I went through a sticker-collecting phase as a little girl. I kept books full of my favorite stickers, and gathered with friends to trade for a new fuzzy or iridescent sticker that I wasn’t able to find or afford at the local mall. My love for stickers faded as I entered my teens, but it’s been rekindled in my thirties as a way to add pizzazz to my planner and make me smile. My favorite source for planner stickers is Melanie Viens, an independent artist who sells via her Etsy shop, MelanieJean Market. I stock up on her seasonal stickers to spruce up my monthly and weekly spreads and make them reflect how I’m feeling and the activities I’m doing. I also purchased an extra supply of Clever Fox stickers (a few sheets come with every planner)
My Planner Prepping Dreams
I don’t have affiliate links in this post, but I must confess that I’ve considered buying a 10-year supply of Clever Fox Weekly Pro planners to ensure I am able to keep using them regardless of how the company evolves. Perhaps it’s a bit of planner prepping. I’ve created a wishlist of the colors I don’t yet own. If you end up using my recommendation and gaining personal benefit from this approach to planning and are compelled to contribute to my planner preps, feel free to contribute to my planner preps.