Tis the season for planning for the new year!
I love this time of the year because I’m a total planning nerd – I love seeing how other people plan and organize their lives and businesses for the next year. I’m obsessed with new year planning and goal setting videos on YouTube. I also just love buying stickers and washi tape, but that’s a topic for a different post!
Today, I wanted to take you on a quick tour of the planners and journals I’ll be using for 2023.
2023 will be a bit different for me because I’ve decided to add a digital planning tool to my arsenal, which is something I thought I would never do. The blasphemy! Buttt, I am totally obsessed with it so far…keep reading to find out more!
Alrighty, first up we have my writing journal:
I started this journal at the end of December 2021 and will continue using it until it’s all used up! It’s really a catch-all of writing notes – I record snippets of stories, take notes on books I’m reading, do random plotting, record random thoughts about my writing, make lists, track sprints, etc. Really anything that doesn’t have a different home to go to goes in my writing journal.
Also, this is a Leuchtturm 1912 notebook with the dot grid.
Next up we have a budget planner from Erin Condren.
2023 is going to haaaave to be the year I spend more time wrangling my finances, both personal and business. I am really just a pro at evaporating my money (see above note about loving to buy planner stickers and supplies). I mean, I bought a special budget book to track my budget and I think that tells you all you need to know.
So all my goals and notes about finances will go in this little guy (I also have special budget stickers, LOL).
And for my last physical planner, we have the big daddy, a 2023 hourly Life Planner from Erin Condren.
This will be my first year using an hourly layout and I’m very excited! I decided to make the switch to an hourly layout (instead of a vertical) because so many of my events and tasks are time-oriented in a way that they haven’t been before. I also think doing an hourly layout will allow me to track my time better and make sure I’ve saved time in my day for stuff I want/need to do (like writing!).
Last but definitely not least – my digital planning tool: Notion! I feel like I’m a little late to the Notion party, so it’s probably not the first time you’re hearing about it. I had been holding out on using a digital planner. I wanted to keep everything physical because I love the act of putting pen to paper.
I had been using a large (8.5×11) monthly planner for my business goals and social media planning. But that way of tracking content is just not working for me anymore. I’ve found that I don’t have the time to physically track social media posts and ideas like that. I wouldn’t even reference that tool for months and then it just felt like a waste of time, money, and space.
Enter Notion!
There’s a desktop version and an app. The screenshots below are from the app version, of my home page and my different workspaces. I would recommend doing the majority of the initial set up on the desktop, just because it’s so much to tinker with, but the app is going to be great for taking notes on the go.
I mainly set up Notion to organize my social posts. You can make calendars and pre-plan your content and also organize it by platform, type, and whatever else you can think of! You can write captions and even add images and links, so that it’s easy peasy to make the post when it’s time (I haven’t dipped my toes in social media schedulers yet, so don’t judge).
I’m not a Notion pro at this point by any means, but there are plenty of videos on YouTube – I found a live Notion build to be the most helpful. Once you have the basics down, you can then go back and fiddle around with *aesthetics*.
I initially wanted to use Notion just for content planning, but I think I’m going to be happy using it for anything related to my author business. I can track income and expenses, manage projects and ideas, capture resources and info I need to access frequently, and literally anything else you can think of.
So, what tools are you using to organize your life for the new year? Have any questions about how I’ll be using my different planners?
jessicaminyard.com 
I used to love Notion, but then I realised that my use cases for notebooks and productivity apps were mostly for idea logging, and Notion wasn’t snappy enough for that. So I switched to Obsidian and that’s been great for me thus for. Anyway, thanks for this post!
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LOL I haven’t heard of Obsidian yet! I’ll have to check it out if Notion doesn’t seem to work for me
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