Reduce Frustration With Your Planner - 4 Tips For Finding Information Quickly

[VIDEO TRANSCRIPT]

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Hello my friends. I hope you're doing well. As it relates to planners, frustration comes in when you cannot find the information you need in your planner. So if you ever flipped through your planner looking for information and you couldn't find it then this video is for you. I'm going to give you four tips on how to reduce frustration and how to find information quickly in your planner.

If you're new here Hello, my name is Tonya and I make videos on functional planning. If feeling organized and productive is something that interests you, please be sure to hit the like and subscribe button.

We have a great community here where we leave comments underneath these videos to discuss planner topics and to answer each other's questions. The binder that I'm showing here is called the Tiffany; it’s a beautiful croc binder.

It has the strap closure as you can see here and it is constructed extremely well. Let me show you this up close. The stitching, everything, the quality is top notch on this binder.

This is the spine and this is the back of the binder. It has a slip pocket here where you can slip in stickers or sheets of paper in it’s beautiful fattening material inside of there.

This binder has just the right amount of tension here to keep the binder close when you want it and to easily open it when you want it. This binder has loads of organization and one of the highlights of this binder among many is that it comes with this beautiful fly leaf divider that has the beautiful croc material that matches the binder and card slots on the other side.

In addition to a pin loop; this binder has a zippered pocket here, there is a place where you can sit documents in here and also another area where you can slip documents and in the back of the binder we have a slot here, another slot here, and two slots here. This binder is the classic size and it has seven rings so it will fit Franklin planner insert.

This is a Tonya Plans binder sold at Tonyaplans.com. I will put the link for you in the description area underneath this video. This binder also comes in a smaller compact size, you can save money with discount promo code TONYAPLANS10.

TIP 1

So tip number one for not feeling frustrated with your binder is to develop an easy simple system on where you're going to put what. One of the biggest challenges I believe with modern paper planners like us is combining the use of technology with paper planners.

One problem I used to have is when I had information on my Microsoft Outlook calendar, and that information did not match or sync with the information I had on my paper planner.

So now what I do is when I am sent an invite to attend a meeting, when I look at the invite before I press the Accept button, because when you press the Accept button in Microsoft Outlook, it then saves it to your calendar.

Before I press that button, I'll get my planner out and write in the appointment. After I write the appointment in then I hit the Accept button and it’s added to my Outlook calendar.

This way, I have the appointment on my Outlook calendar and a pop up reminder and notification will come up on my computer or my phone. And also I'll have record of that meeting in my planner.

So that's an example of a little simple, easy system that I developed to make sure I keep my digital calendars and my paper planners in sync.

So that's one thing that you can do as well; think about where the frustrations are with your planner and make sure you put simple, easy little systems in place to help reduce that frustration.

TIP 2

The second tip I have for reducing frustration in your planner is to retrieve information using your monthly index. Have you ever flipped through a bunch of pages in your planner looking for something that you know you wrote down?

That is especially a frustration you can have if you use a daily planner. An example of a daily planner is here. This is a day on one page. So this is a whole day. And this is a whole day. You have a prioritized daily task list on this page, you have an appointment schedule and you have a section for notes.

So when you have a daily planner like this and your notes can be spread across several pages, sometimes it's hard to find that information that you wrote down. I think when you use a daily planner, it's especially useful to use a monthly index.

So a Monthly Index is simply a table of contents for your planner. So as you are going throughout your days and you are writing notes, it this is something that you think you may want to retrieve later, you will simply come here and put the date that you put the note on, you’ll list the date here and then here you'll put what the information is.

So for example, on this date, I have a note about a doctor's appointment I had so I can simply turn to that day and know that I have notes about my doctor's appointment right there.

So this will help you retrieve information quickly and it will eliminate you flipping through a bunch of planner pages, you can certainly come to your monthly indexes and find the information that you're looking for.

The monthly index in the Franklin planner is on the front of each monthly tab. And if possible, you should try to update it as you go along. If you forget, or you're in a hurry, when you do your daily or weekly planning, you can always come back here and fill in your monthly index a little later.

TIP 3

The third tip for retrieving information quickly in your planner to reduce frustration is to retrieve information from information records or from the Tab sections in your planner.

So here is how information records look. And it is simply a form where you can put some information at the top in the header section, and then write all of the notes that are pertaining to a particular subject in one place.

So for example, if you're working on a project, and you know that you're going to have several notes pertaining to that project, you may want to use an information record so that all your notes are in one place.

So when you use your information record, if you happen to start writing notes on your daily planner pages, but need more room to continue writing those, you can use the information record and simply put in a date to reference where your other notes are.

That way you don't have to rewrite information that you already wrote on your daily planner pages. And then on the information record, all of the information related to a certain subject is all on one or several information, record pages.

Or you can use tabbed sections in your planner to categorize information. So you may want to take all your work notes and put them in a certain tab in your planner. So you know that when you got to refer to work related notes or a certain subject, you can simply go to that section.

Or maybe you want to make sure that you keep all your finances and budget information in one place, you can have a tab section for that also. And it can make it easy for you to retrieve information, because you'll know all of your information related to that topic is in that tab area.

TIP 4

And a fourth tip for retrieving information quickly in your planner is using the parentheses method. So let's say that you have several notes on your daily planner pages. And they're related to different topics, what you would want to do is number those notes.

So for example, if this was two different topics, this will be number one, and I'll put it in parentheses, and this would be number two, and I'll put in parentheses.

So you simply number your daily notes on different topics. And then on your monthly index and parentheses, I can put the note that it refers to like I have a one and parentheses there. And then on that same day, I can put the date again and then a two to reference the second note.

So with the parentheses method, you can reference several different notes by using parentheses to refer to the notes that are on the same date.

So those are basically my tips that I have for retrieving information quickly in your planner. So a personal note about something that frustrates me about my planning system that I need to do a better job on; well, I have my main planning system, sometimes companies will reach out to me and they'll send me a planner for me to review.

So before I review it on this YouTube channel, I want to try it out. So, when I try out that planner, I'll leave my main planner hop over to this new planner, try it out for a couple of weeks and then I go back to my main planner.

So if I do that two or three times I have my information in two or three planners so then when it's time for me to retrieve information, sometimes it's written in a planner that I only use for a couple of weeks and so then I'm looking through a bunch of planners and looking to retrieve information and that's frustrating to me.

So one of the things that I know that I need to do a better job about is to make sure that when I temporarily use a new planner to make sure I transfer the information back to my main planner because it is really frustrating trying to look for information through several different planners.

Do you have some tips on how to reduce frustration with your planner? I love talking to you guys about planners, feel free to leave a comment underneath this video.

Please don't forget to like this video. This is Tonya, helping you feel more organized so this can be your best year yet.

Take care.