2020 Planner Midyear Review

We are almost halfway through 2020 and, like most of you, I have some thoughts about the current planner I’m using to manage my day to day activities. At the end of 2019 I wrote this blog post about the planners I had selected to use for 2020. For my regular daily planner, I went back to the ever popular, Erin Condren Planner.

What I love about the Erin Condren planner (EC Planner):

• Solid coil binding
• Opens flat
• Right-sized monthly planner squares
• Sun-Sat layout
• Choice of binding and cover

But something changed since I last used this planner in 2018: the monthly tabs no longer open to the calendar spread, but rather they open to the highlights and goal page. I don’t like this at all. My workaround is to use a decorative paperclip to attach the two pages so that when I select the monthly tab for the current month, it grabs both pages and opens to the calendar page I am looking for.

In my previous two EC planners, the monthly tab opened to the calendar page. I’m not sure why this was changed or if they’ll go back. Frankly, I find myself missing my Saint Belford Curio Planner, so I may go back to that in 2021.

Initially, I decided to stop using the Saint Belford Planner (SB Planner) because I didn’t like the fact that the monthly view pages were listed at the beginning of the planner (pages 30-55), while the monthly/weekly breakdowns were listed by month at the back of the journal (pages 58-269). To help get to the page you want, they include two ribbon bookmarks: one gray and one pink. I used one to mark the current month and the other to mark the current week.

But what I loved about the SB Planner is the leather cover, called the Compendium. It’s made of high-grade faux leather and contains  inner pockets for notes and receipts, cardholder slots, a pen loop, and it uses a magnetic buckle closure to keep it all nicely secure.

I also liked all of the extras the SB Planner included such as some high level planning at the beginning of the year: Bucket List, Mission, Savings, Habits,and some notes of Self-Care. For more information about the SB Planner, visit their website.

Is this a case of never being happy with the one you’re with? Possibly. There are studies and articles that show how too many choices can be a bad thing- more time spent on deciding, seldom convinced we chose right, fearing that the better option is still out there. This article was featured in Fast Company in October 2019.