My Planning and Note-Taking System

Journalling has been a big part of me since I was a kid. My mother used to say that I would carry around a small notebook and a pencil in my pocket and when we were out of the house I would write on it whenever I can. What did a five-year-old me write on her notebook? I wish I knew. I would love to see what I had penned. I wished my mom kept all of the notebooks but I knew she didn’t think that they would become something that I would treasure in the future.

At this point in my journalling journey, I must say that I do not discriminate neither digital nor paper planning. I’m a planner girlie through and through and I love them both equally. I love my iPad Air and Apple Pencil and I love all my paper planners and Pilot pens. Journalling itself is therapeutic and what medium I would prefer to do so depends on my mood at that time.

A few years ago, I used the bullet journalling method and loved it for quite some time but for reasons I have explained in this blog post – Why I stopped bullet journalling – I moved on to a customised planner from Ana Tomy which served its purpose and was exactly what I wanted in a planner to plan my day. It’s refillable so once you’ve used up the planner, you can order a new set of refill which I have done a couple of times in the recent years.

In early 2021, I got myself and iPad Air 4 and dabbled into the world of digital planning. My, my, my. The whole journalling era is changed forever because digital planning is just out of this world. Both planning systems have their pros and cons and speaking as someone who has tried both digital and paper planning, I love them just the same. What can I say? I’m a sucker for everything planners.

In this post, I’m going to show you the three ways of how I take notes.

01. For monthly/weekly/daily to-do lists and habit tracking

The planner I am currently using is the ana tomy X Lilin+Co ‘Fireplace’ A5s Trio Book (it is sold out but you can shop different variation here) that I purchased last year on a whim because lilac? It’s screaming for me. The trio book is essentially a 3 notebook set that you can customise to better fit what you need.

As for myself, I chose:

1. 12-month undated planner (it also comes with two grid pages after each month for more note-taking)
2. 53-week undated planner (horizontal layout, two pages per week)
3. To-do list & habit tracker

This will be my refill order going forward because it has everything I need to plan my day and to track my habits. If you need more space for notes, you can swap the to-do list & habit tracker notebook for plain ones.

The monthly planner is strictly used for events and also for jotting down my kids’ schedule because they are in school and they have field trips, sports day etc that I need to remember.

As for the weekly planner, I transfer events from monthly to weekly planner and I also write down blog post published in that week (for reference), my meals, my daily chores to-do list, and some quick notes about the day, for example, “– went for breakfast with the hubs after sending kids”

For the to-do list & habit tracker, so far I’m using the to-do list for listing down post ideas that I hundred percent want to write on my blog and the habit tracker is self-explanatory. If you would like a glimpse of the layout, check out my previous post.

This is the current note-taking system that I’m quite happy with so far (until I go back to digital planning, that is.) Let me know what your current setup looks like!