Plannerpalooza. Ep 20

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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vandercam. I'm a mother of four, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah hart Unger. I'm a mother of two and soon to be three and a practicing physician. We are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This is episode twenty and we are going to be doing a planner Palooza today. The Planner Palooza episode mostly Sarah's recommendation on how to choose a good planner, use your planner, well how she uses it, because she's the total planner queen. But we're airing this episode in sort of mid late December, so as we're doing this, we're thinking about what we're doing over the holiday breaks. How much time do you guys have off from school, Sarah, Our kids have two weeks off, both of them, so, but you're gonna be hunkered down in Newborn then, yeah, this is not going to be your typical leave. I think there's not going to be any travel, And in fact, this is the first episode that we're recording where I guarantee I will have had the baby by the time that this is airing, So we're going to be hunkering down, hanging out. The good news is when you live in Miami Beach, a lot of people come to you. So my parents are coming down. I have a couple of friends, including that guest Chavon from one of our earlier episodes. They're going to be coming to the area, and so I just hope to spend time with family, with the baby and seeing everybody who visits. Are you guys traveling? We are. We're going to be going skiing in Colorado over part of the break, which I don't ski, So this is this is sort of not my vacation. We've we've come up with, you know, sort of an amicable split of whose vacation preferences get done, who does ski, and he really wants the kids to ski to The older three are signed up for like groups, ski lessons or ski school the first two days and then they'll ski with him. I think the third and fourth day I'm going to be hanging out with the little guy in our rental. Are you sure you don't want to ski? I know, I think, But what could I do with him? Though? I don't know. I guess I put him at a lot of the ski places have daycares, but I've had mixed experiences with them. I mean, the daycare you send your kid to during the year has an interest in keeping you happy, because like, you're there all the time and they see you every day for years. I'm not sure that all the ski places day cares. They're like, you're gone in three days, what do you care? And you have no other options anyway, So we've we've not had some awesome experiences in the past with them. So I'm gonna just have him with me. We're gonna bring our snowpans and go out and they'll play in the snow and I'll bring lots of videos and hopefully it won't be too that's fun and maybe maybe the year after he'll be old enough to go to Yeah, the next year, we have to be three, right, So he'll be almost three in late December, and so he'll be almost four the next year, and so it's really more about definitely. That's definitely study on your feet and being potty trained is kind of the big thing for he has not yet oh cross that line. It's going to be soon, that will say. He actually told me the other day, you'll love this. He said, my butt is too big for diapers. That's amazing. I know. I love that. So I'm like, and I will say, I mean, you had so much experience with potty training obviously, but it's funny. I went, I was looking at my own blog, as I sometimes do, and I noticed that in January of twenty fourteen, I was or twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, it was this past year. Wow, that's work. That's odd. I was like, Cameron's never gonna potty train, he has no interest. And then in Februar it was like Cameron's potty trains. So yeah, sometimes they just really quickly. I assume that's what will happen here because he's almost and so he'll just decide to do it. Maybe, but if it's that week while we're on vacation, that'll be awkward, so we'll stay. Oh, but that might be a good use of funny. So our main segment this week we're talking planners, and so one of the things I've always loved about the Shoe Box Blog is is Sarah's planner, Uh interest obsession. We can just say obsessions. Okay, I'll talk for the next thirty minutes. Oh my goodness. No. I really really like planners, and I think that's that speaks to I really really like being intentional with my time, and I find them the best tool for me to help me do that. So I really I've used planners for for decades now and I don't know how I would function without them. And it always boggles my mind when I see a patient leave my office and I say, Okay, get the labs done in four months, two weeks prior to the visit, and please have your handex ray done a week prior to the visit, and they don't write anything down, and I think, well, that's never going to happen, and to be honest, like often it doesn't. So my medical system actually has started to call people, but the ones who write it down, I know it's going to happen. So for to me, it's like the difference between life that feels very in control and very deliberate and life that just I don't know how people get through the day, so it's become quite an obsession, and I really enjoy the aesthetics of the process as well, I will admit, so I will be happy to talk about some of the different systems I have used over the years and how things have evolved. Okay, So I began, I would say, in the early two thousands using Exa Kompta planners, which still exist and they're made with really smooth paper and you can still buy them online. My layout of choice was one what's called the Space twenty four, which had on the left side all of the days of the week on the right side of blank page. So I guess that was sort of an early I knew I really liked having a list for the week. I liked having space to free form and write things down. But they also had monthly pages which were helpful for long range planning, as I'll get to. So that was sort of my first iteration, and I would say I use that from the early two thousands until around maybe two thousand and eight or so, and then one of my best friends is also super into planners, literally like we write the dorkiest emails to each other I'm gonna leave her nameless, but she probably is hearing this and knows yes. And I think she got me into this like bizarre Korean company that I had to order off of eBay, and I don't even remember what they were called, but they were a little bit more free form, a little bit more spaces so that I could kind of customize a little bit more. And then she also introduced me to the Aaron Kondrun Planners, which are have a bit of a cult like following. They're an American company and they are very colorful and sort of happy looking, and they have an interesting layout on the weekly part where there's three boxes for every day and you can customize those however you want, so I became kind of intricate in how I like to do that. However, it all kind of came I think I've found what we call planner piece. In twenty fourteen, when I used to read this blog called Plannerisms, because yeah, why wouldn't you if you were me, and she featured something called the Hobo ni Chi Techo Techho. I'm still I think it is. It actually should be tetchho if you're going to pronounce fanatically in Japanese, but in my brain it's Techo, so whatever you may hear me say both. And she showed a model called the Cousin that they have that had daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly pages. And I had never seen a system that was so all encompassing, because usually if you want a weekly, you're not going to have a daily, and if you want to mind like, you're not usually going to get all three of those things in one place. And that is when I've think I really got to the full when they heard it out right, exactly exactly, and that's what I've been using ever since, actually various iterations of that system, and it's worked really really well for me. Do you have to just practically, Yeah, they're Japanese, right, and you have to order them from Japan. You have to order them from Japan, but they're English there. They have a big American following too, and they know that. So the website is in English, and I mean there's a version of the website in English. There's obviously a version in Japanese. The only things the prices are in yend so you have to like use your Google calculator to make sure you're not buying something exorbitant and they started April though, or do they start January. I know that you always remember that detail. They have both. They have January start planners, and I think it's March or April. There's a spring start, because I guess traditionally that's sort of like the big and that makes sense because seasons, you know, everything's growing and starting in the spring. But I will admit I prefer my planners to start in January and sync with the rest of the world. And the one that I like actually is not offered in English. It's in Japanese, but if you visit my blog you'll see some shots of it. The Japanese is pretty unobtrusive, honestly, because you can see the months, you can see the days. It's mostly numbers. So it sounds more intimidating than it is to have your planner in Japanese because obviously I don't speak a word of Japanese, so and I find the system completely usable, so that part is not as much as of a barrier as one might think. But what they do have is a lot of features that I use like crazy, and I will say I'll give a shout out to the whole bullet journaling community, because that is a thing that's become popular in the last few years, and I became interested in it to some extent. I actually had an instagram that still exists, you can check it out called shoe Box Underscore Plans, and I was experimenting with some bullet journaling type techniques. But what a bullet journal is sort of a free form planner that you customize yourself and do you do each page to your liking. You actually design your own week spreads, so you're not using pre printed boxes. But I quickly figured out that this was not going to work for me because A I'm way too much of a perfectionist. Like if I were to design a weekly page and then one box was smaller than the other, which it would be because I'm not that great of an artist, it would drive me nuts. And B I don't have time to do that because it would be a like a burden for me to feel like I had to draw out my week every week. So I would much rather use some bullet journal free form concepts, but use them on the perfectly laid out pages that are in you know, commercially available planners. But it is a really cool. If you look at various bullet journaling sites or Instagram feeds, you can get a lot of inspirations of cool things to track or different ways people have laid things out. And I will say that things can get pretty over the top. I like my planners to be fairly very functional. I want them to be neat, like the aesthetics do matter to me, but I'm not all about, you know, fifty sets of stickers and themes. And my my planner nerd friends says that that makes me a unique voice in the planner sphere because I do have this obsession, but most of the people that have the obsession are all about the decorating, and I'm much more about the content and the function. So it sounds like they're kind of using their planners almost as like scrap books. It's a different sort of yeah, and there could be a role for that, but yes, that's exactly it. Some people are using it as scrap books or I don't know, almost like trading cards, like you want to show each other what you're doing because it's really pretty, or artwork and artistic outlet. But I don't really I see it. There's much more. FEE just need to get stuff done. Basically, I want to get stuff done. I want it to look nice. I want to help me like organize my thinking around how I spend my time. But yeah, the primary goal is not the planner itself. And I do dispose of my planner. I recycle that I'm gonna shread them at the end of the year, so it's not like I'm creating some timeless memento. I'm using it for now, all right, So tell us about the features that you use and how you use them. So the monthly so in the Hopunichi. Again, I have a lot of features that I can use, and I really do. Whoever designed this thing had a really good sense of any possible way that you one might want to use a paper planner, and I take advantage of many of them. There are monthly calendar pages, just like there are in most planners, and I tend to use those for big picture stuff. So the call schedules, so when we're going to be on call, planning out when we might fit in trips for big advents. I don't bother to stick in my daily appointments on the monthly pages. That's way too much work. But in terms of blocking out big chunks of time and knowing when Josh or I might be on call. They're very important, and actually, since I went eighty percent time, I did use them to design kind of the exact balance of my clinical versus off time versus gmy time, so I've used them for that as well. Then there are these daily pages, and on the daily pages, I write out the day's logistics, and I tend to, as I've mentioned in a prior episode, do a lot of my deep work planning in the morning, so I will write through kind of how the flow of the day is going to work when I'm going to have patients I might have. And by the way, I do keep patient data out of there, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't write an anonymous note like call hyperinsulinism patient about X Y or Z, because I'll know who I'm talking about. But I do feel like it could be dangerous to put actual patient data in because we could get in trouble for that, so I keep it anonymous. And I also make checkboxes for every patient note that I have to write unlabeled because it just makes me feel so good like I'm getting through it. As the day goes on, I also track habits on the daily pages. So at the top of the hopin EG pages, there are these little checkboxes which I find perfect for checking off like my pre neial vitamin and tracking time right now, which is a habit that I'm trying to cultivate. And yeah, we'll have to I'll have to add some visuals to a blog post to go with this so you guys can see what I'm talking about. But the daily pages are pretty full by the time the day is done, and they definitely lay out my attention intentions for the day at the start. Then there are weekly pages, and that's where the meat of my tracking to do items goes. So for example, when I mentioned my patients, you know, if I've instructed them to do certain labs or studies prior to an appointment in a few months. If I get that kind of instruction, I just go to whatever week that is and put a box in it. So it's a long range and short range and I pull both from kind of my long range planning adjunctive system that I'll talk about as well, and the kind of stuff like that, Like I literally just put a box. In February twenty eighteen, that said book kids dentist appointments for May, because I knew by then i'd have my work schedule. But right now I don't have my work schedule. But if I just wait till I think of it like what a burden a and be unrealistic, like I would just forget and then it I'd be, oh, how many months just went by since my kids went to the dentists. So the weekly is like the meat of all the to do type stuff. And then I also tend to plan out my running for the week, like what days I plan to run or work out, and I put dinner plans on there as well, and that's just sort of habit, like for meal planning. And I also for next year, I'm going to try to put Josh's workout schedule so that we can kind of make sure that we have determined that we can both realistically do what we want to do with our you know, many children and baby et cetera. And by the way, my schedule is not going to be ambitious, but it's going to exist. And then finally, there's these blank pages in the beginning of each month in this particular planner, and I use those to set up habits and goals and kind of note any big events for each month. So I don't do yearly resolutions. I tend to do monthly and I always kind of write them out on those pages. So yeah, those are the main features that I use in the planner itself. But then there are accessories. Yes, there are accessories. So I've mentioned before I love the David Allen's Getting Things Done concepts. I don't use his system exactly, but I've definitely borrowed from some of the way I think about the future and kind of keep track of various projects. And so what I figured out is I have added like a very thin notebook. I mean it's it's it's super thin, like it's shocking that it lasted all year, but it has very thin pages that tucks into the planner itself where I keep track of all kinds of project lists, and that's how I can kind of decide intentionally what's going to go on those weekly to do lists and then finally the daily lists. So you know, just a few examples of what's in there is what's called projects lists, so sort of big things I have going on, and I divide them into a work one and a rest of life one. I have monthly updated next actions lists, which are that's directly from David Allen. It's a way of deciding sort of what you want to do next. He doesn't propose doing them on a monthly basis, but that's what's worked for me. I have a Sunday Maybe list, which I think is similar to some of Laura's cool seasonal bucket lists, which we'll talk about as well. And there's also in there my own checklist for what I want to look at each week and each month. And as I wrote them at the beginning of this year, I thought, oh ha, I'll just like put these in here, But I've ended up referring to them every single month because I've noted that when I actually do go through them, it helps me to know exactly what's going on, so I'll tell you what's on them. I can also share photos of these, but on my weekly one here the page is flipping here sound effects. I have review my project's list, review my next actions list, and add to the weekly list anything targeted for the week. To empty my physical inboxes, so I have like a mail shelf that I really don't touch except for weekly, and then a thing on my desk that I empty weekly, empty my Gmail, which I know Laura is agast at, but it really doesn't take that long and it makes me feel better. Plan workouts, meals, and any needed childcare, and then review the plan with Josh. So that's the weekly review one and then the monthly review one is to number one review the prior month's goals. Number two reconcile our budget and we use that budgeting app I had mentioned. You need a budget. Number three review with Josh any big upcoming events. Number four identify the next actions for the new month. Number five set up any habit goals for the month, and number six obtain any needed childcare for the month. So I know that if I do the weekly one at the end of the week and the monthly one at the end of the month, I am pretty so, Sarah, just practical question here. Does the whole planner system come with you to work every day or yeah? And it's not as big as you might be a bit, No, not at all. It's I mean it's this, it's like smaller than I guess it's the size of your average small novel. I mean it's not big. And I'm actually going to try an even smaller one for next year. And when I this notebook, I mean, it's amazing because it's kept all of twenty seventeen stuff and it's like it looks like a tiny pamphlet. There's something really great about the paper that the Hopennichi company uses that's it's like this Japanese Tomo River paper that makes their stuff not take up a lot of space. So I really love that about their stuff. So you could non sponsor just bring the whole with you every day and it's yep, just tuck it and I bring it just goes in my bag. But it's it's not it's really not that huge. It sounds much huger than it is. And in that little slim notebook that I mentioned, I also keep sort of some and this is where I got a bit inspired by that bullet journal community. Like I'll track books read in the year. I've tracked books that I've read with Annabel, like chapter books that we've done at night movies. And I track my rvus, which are sort of productivity units that physicians used to show like how many patients they're seeing. Because I wanted to see how that would change after I went to eighty percent time, et cetera. I will track new restaurants we've tried so I can remember them. And I've even put things like running training plans in there at times when I've been training, which I am obviously currently not. Wow, well that's a lot. It's a lot. It's it's it really really works for me though, and I it's it's almost funny. I'm sort of sad that I feel like I've I've found the system, because tinkering with the system is part of the fun of the system. But I don't I don't know that that much more needs to change. So if we have like people who don't really use you know, have not gone to the dark side and these elaborate planners yet, I mean, is there any really like entry point planner that you would recommend that Yeah, you know, it's so funny. But when I went back and looked at that Exacompta planner, just I mean, it really doesn't matter. There are so many beautiful planners out there right now. I can name several, like so the day Designer are very pretty for daily pages. There's a company called Inkual Press that is run female owned and run, and they have a number of useful products. Aaron Kndun planners are super accessible and they now have hardback planners, not just the spiral type. There's a new company called Golden Coil where you can customize your own and that may sound complicated, but actually you just go to their website and you're able to kind of decide what pages you'd like in your planner. We're really just you know, Target actually has a lot of sort of if you just want to try something without much of a commitment. They have some budget versions of these quote unquote, like fancy designer planners, like for the days as day Designer is one example. So I don't necessarily know that it matters what tools you use. You can definitely have a lot of fun with great and I do feel like the stuff I use is awesome in its own right, but it's it's not necessary. You can you can plan really well with pretty minimal supplies as you do. But what does Josh use. I'm curious actually he has. He is not as much of a natural planner as I am, but he he is. I have influenced him and he has this little arc system that he got at Staples where it allows him to he's he's able to like insert pages and remove pages, and it's kind of He actually uses a lot of the getting things done methodology too, and he also does use Google Calendar on the on on his phone and on the computer, which, by the way, I have nothing against digital systems. I just find that for me, I am not able to integrate them as well, and I'm not able to input things as quickly and have it. I mean, it's it's crazy because I know we're surrounded by screens, but my planner is always either on my desk at work, or on my desk at home or in my back So I don't find the accessibility to be the art because people say, oh, my phone's always with me, but it's like you have to launch the app and you have to open it and then like, oh what a homeie phone or the batteries off, and it takes me much longer to input events on those digital systems. So but I haven't gone that way, but he likes it. I mean, when your office is getting patient schedules stuff, I mean, so how does that, Oh, that's totally different. That's I mean, we have an electronic medical record, but I don't need to track that's not like personal stuff that I need to try. That's like I know what we can't work and then yes, exactly once I'm at work, like my my my clinical to do list and patient systey is all in the electronic medical record and it needs to be cloistered away like that because again that's protected like private health information, and that system is designed specifically for that. But you know that I don't. I'm the only thing that I would say like that. I I track work projects that are not patient related on paper, and I track the number of rvus meaning like the value units that I see on paper. But other than that, there's like those are two separate worlds. Yeah, So I think that's what a lot of people wind up with, you know, questions about how to do it. Not that they're in the medical world, but you know, they have their electronic calendar at work like outlook or whatever that their assistants putting stuff on. Their colleagues is putting stuff on. How they integrate that with a paper planning system, and so I think I have that too. I do have that though, like so for non clinical things, for like GM type stuff. But I have found that that because so my work uses outlook. My husband sometimes uses Google, you know, then I'll get like a random birthday invite on paper. Like for me, I will put all the meetings and stuff, and it helps that I'm not the kind of person who has like ten meetings a day. Okay, we're talking maybe three or four meetings a week that are put onto my outdow calendar. They go into my paper planners so I can see, oh, is that on my day off? Is that on the day I already volunteered for school? Oh josh it, you know, for me, the paper will integrate that stuff. So non clinical off that comes through work outlook actually does make it onto paper, and it takes a second. It really is not. But I think that's what nudges a lot of people into doing their personal lives on electronic things is in order to keep it that, you know, so their assistant doesn't put something on the day they volunteered at their kids' school, right that that have that got work life integration that they have to keep it. The work won't change, so they have to put it on what's been electronically dictated at work. So that's interesting. That's a good point. Yeah, I don't have like my days off in our outlooks. So if I get an invite to something, then but then I sort of have the the chance to decide, Okay, is this important enough that I shouldn't take my day off or is this not important? And I can just like decline the invite. I do a lot of declining sometimes it depends on the season. Some people don't even know you can do a lot of you're allowed to. Yeah, I do a lot of accepting too. Don't get me wrong. There are plenty of meetings and things. But I'm I. You know, if it happens to be, for example, on the day of my preschool Thanksgiving that I had already committed to going to, then yeah, yes, yeah, no, I have pretty budget. I have not crossed over to the dark side on that. Somebody actually gave me an Aaron Condron planner as a as a gift reset. But I'm not. You know, when you have a system that works for you, like, don't change it. And I support known people who's like, well, I should go to an electronic system because that's the way of the modern world or something. But no, if you have to be a system, you'll trust yourself to look at and to be fully accountable for that, like everything is on there, because if you don't have that, then then it's useless. Like then you're still thinking about stuff. And that's the whole point of the planner, is that you're not thinking about it, that you're not having to think in February. Did I set that dentist appointment for May? Because you won't remember it or it'll just make you tense thinking about stuff like that. So I mean my planning system is, you know, I guess not high end in the sense of I just have a notebook that I use. I have some preferences with it, Like I wanted the cover not to be you know, completely like paper terrible easy. So right now there's just this thing called Notes Cambridge Edition. But I got it from Cambridge. Yeah, I get it. I got it from Target, right Like it's it's definitely Target. But I like the college ruled page and I like using my paper mate and joy pen and that. You know. The way I plan I make yearly sort of goals and sort of big ideas of things I want to do in my life, set quarterly goals based on that. But the real meat of my planning tends to happen both on my calendar, which is a day mind or weekly thing. It's got to be weekly. It's got to be pocket sized because I carried around in my person. But anything that is time specific, I put on as soon as I know what it is. And I would recommend you know, you get your kids school schedules a long time in advance. I mean most districts will post them like two years ahead of time that you know they have to set their teacher schedules and everything. So you can actually find out what your winter break is in twenty nineteen, and if you'd like it off, consider this a public service announcement to go find those days so you can put in for them when you are needing to do that. So there's that you can so I put time specific stuff on there as soon as I know what it is. My notebook is separate. It is a sort of normal sized notebook. I plan for the week. I tend to plan on Friday afternoons, sometimes Thursday if I've gotten through a lot of stuff early, but plan on Friday looking to the next week, saying what do I want to get done? What do I want to get done? Professionally, what do I want to get done personally, both family stuff, friend stuff for me, and then I list those priorities out and then I get a sense of what's already on my calendar and when I would like to schedule stuff on the calendar. I think through the weekends. Ideally I've thought through the weekends a little bit more ahead of time, but the plan is often rough earlier in the week and then I firm it up by Friday, so I can, you know, make sure everyone's to go on that. But yeah, that's basically my planner process. It is not neat looking. I mean, I just put the date of the week on the top of the page and then I write the list of things that need to get done my top priorities. So I don't list every single thing, because some stuff I'll do anyway. But you know, it's like, what's going up on the blog, what are we doing on the podcast? Where am I in my different book projects? You know, what's speaking gigs? Do I have coming up that I need to practice for? And that's basically what it looks like. It sounds actually not that different from what I do, just not as obsessively aesthetically, which maybe my desk being a bit of a mess and all that that stuff, but yeah, you know, if it works for you, it works. Yeah, yes, And I think that the whole like whether you need your surface is clear. I think that's I think that's got to be one of those like dichotomies. You know, you either you do or you don't. We need to come out with why I can, like my in box zero and yeah, some sort of like yeah, you're right, we need to. We need to. We need Gretchen Rubin out what we divide all humanity into two categories with? Yeah, well cool, so that's our our planner palooza. Should we go from that into our love of the week? Yeah, our love of the week. Yes, except well two things. Number one, I want you to talk about your season. Oh yes, I forgot. And number number two, I always get this question on my blog and elsewhere, so I'm just gonna answer it, which is like, what are your favorite tools to use with your planners? Like toys and and I actually don't use that many, so it's not a terribly long answer, but I have a Uniball jet Stream three, which is just a fancy ballpoint pen. It's nothing crazy, but it comes with the planner and you can buy them on jet pens or Amazon or anywhere. That's what I used to write, So it's not terribly fancy. But I will say the Mildliner line of highlighters that they have a dual tip. One is like a highlighter tip. On the other side is a fine tip. It's sort of a very sheer marker. They're the best. They're really good for kind of, you know, making it colorful without necessarily going over the top. It's still pretty, you know, subtle looking, I guess, but you can add emphasis where you need to. And I do like the Stetler tripless fine liner pens as if I need again, like if I'm creating something that needs to have more color emphasis. And I don't do this all the time. It's like when I'm really trying to map something out and I want that color coding, for example a call schedule, they're really helpful. And that's pretty much it. I just see a note about washy tape, and so you have to explain that, oh, yeah, that's true. Well, the only stickers I use are these very minimal like see through like circles that you can get on the hope and each you website to kind of highlight specific dates. And then washy tape is just fancy paper tape with a decoration potentially on it. And again I said, I'm not one of those people that people like cover every page with them, and it looks in my mind just too cluttery. But every once in a while, it's like there's a special day, I'll sort of use that to i don't know, mark the page, or I'll use it to tape something to the page. Like my somehow my my weekly review list and my monthly review lists ended up on different pa maybe I migrated them from the year before. And so it looks cute because so that one other source of sort of frivolous color that I sometimes put on the pages. And yeah, washy tape just means colored paper tape. Well, so the seasonal fun lists that you asked about, they so right now I've been doing I've been doing summer holiday season for a couple of years, and then this year I threw in Fall fun just to you know, really celebrate the fall season. But this is more for there are certain activities that are best done in certain seasons, even they're only then, like going to visit Santa, or you know, picking apples or something, and you have some time on weekends or days off or whatever, and it's always to question what are we going to do with it? And you can wind up doing a lot of the same things over and over again, and that can be fun. And there's you know, different things different weeks, with birthday parties and all that. But sometimes it's fun to feel like I really got the most out of a certain season, Like, you know, did I do the things in the summer that make summer feel like summer to me? Or did I do the things in the holiday that make me feel like I really celebrated this festive season. Or so I make these lists. They usually probably have about, you know, depending on the ambition for the year, eight to twelve things on them, and those are the things I want to do during that season. And then I keep looking at that list and say, will do it? Get those things done? And the good thing is it does nudge me sometimes to do first to think about what I'd like to do and what my family would like to do, and then if I do have some time that's available to actually you know, come up with the cool stuff to do with it. So like for the Fall Fund list, which we recently finished. I had wanted to take two day trips to places that are, you know, like an hour and a half from here, but have really pretty color and natural stuff. And so through some careful scheduling, I was able to have you know, two days in October late October that did not have anything else on them, so I could take advantage of working for myself and actually go do these day trips by myself and enjoy biking in some really cool areas, running in some really cool areas, And so I felt like I'd really enjoyed some personal fun time in the fall because I had this list and because I was thinking about it. So you thought you might do a seasonal fun list this coming year, Sarah, I don't know. I'm like, you know, our seasons are, that's true. Miami has been like everyone's getting all basically no, but for real, everyone's getting all cozy, and that's actually our sort of outdoor season, our best time to go to the zoo or to go to the gardens. So maybe I will, because I probably should try to embrace I've gotten a little curmudgeonly about our endless summer, which I didn't expect prior to moving here. But maybe if I really do embrace the subtle changes that we have with some lists, that might help. So maybe I'll think about doing that for next year. Now. Love of the Week, Yeah, I can start my Love of the Week. That's a you know, on the planning front. It's not planning, it's more retrospective. But I have this Runners World training log and they just send it to you free if you subscribe to the magazine, so it's pretty workhorse type thing, nothing fancy about it. But it just has like a spot for the date, a spot for how much you ran, I guess if you're tracking miles or minutes or anything like that, and then a spot for notes. And it's many, many pages, so you can basically you can get through a whole year on one of them. At least maybe more I haven't looked, And yeah, that's how I track my runs and that that works for me. That's all I need to track. And the funny thing is I can't. I only started doing that every day tracking it in February this year, which I was running for about two months every day prior to actually track it, so I have like no record of the first two months of the running streak except for what's on my time so do they can Yeah, I don't know. I mean, you know, I did run them, but but if I was adding out my annual total of mileage, I'm gonna have to go back and see if I wrote it down on my time logs, which I'm not sure if I did, So we'll see, we'll see. Do you not have a watch that tracks well? So I can't phone? But I don't always have my phone with me when I run, like I don't have my phone on the treadmill with me and that so I wouldn't have written those down. And I don't think the treadmills recording it anywhere. It's not that kind of program thing. Well that brings me to my level this week, and maybe maybe it could be your level of the week someday too. But I have a garment running watch. It's it's actually from a couple a year and a half ago. I think I got in April of twenty sixteen. It's the two thirty five Forerunner, and it will track everything and then just uploads it immediately, and that includes treadable workouts, which is so cool because I feel like I like getting that credit and it's funny. I don't that is one of the few things I don't really track on paper. But it's really fun to go at the end of the year and look, ooh this, look how many miles I ran. Now, of course, this year is not going to be a banner year due to being pregnant the entire year basically, but or at least it feels that way. But but yeah, I really I love this watch. I don't know what I would do without it. It's mostly yeah, I don't know, I'm I guess maybe I'll just feel generally low tech person. I've because I've gotten various tracker type things in the past, like fitbits and whatever. I don't know, it's just I I found the fitbit annoying because I was sort of I felt pressure. But this doesn't pressure me. But it's it's great. It's just you know, automatically, I just press start when I run, you know. So it's fun. But I could see how the journal would do the exact same thing, and then you could always make your own data sheets with Excel or whatever if you really wanted to. So then our Q and A. Yeah, so I had a lot of readers right in after either after the podcast where we talked about tracking time, or perhaps maybe it was a blog post, but anyway, people were saying, oh, I want to do it, but I can't stick to it for any meaningful length of time, and do we have any additional tips? And I will update and say that I actually have been tracking time for maybe a month. I don't know. It's I guess it's easy to lose track when you're tracking that, and I've moved it. I actually was doing in this little notebook and then I just moved it to my planner because I figured, hey, I have that with me all the time. And for me, the key has been don't let better be the enemy of good, which means it's a very imperfect track. And a lot of times I'm doing it the next morning and looking back because I just don't have the energy to put it on paper at night. But it's better than nothing. I can see when I went to bed. I can see when I, you know, wasting time on Instagram or whatever, and because I usually remember generally and yeah, so for me, it's been just like be minimal and then it works. I think that's a good idea in general. What about you. I mean, because the point is not to know how you spend every single minute, Like I don't care when I went to the bathroom, like in the course of the day, like this's not something I need to or I got up and got a snack, like if I was tracking calories, maybe then I'd want to know that. But you know, it's more about getting a rough sense of where the time went, so you can see broader patterns, see if you like how you're using your time, seeing if you're making time for the things that are important to you, or if anything's taking way more time than you thought. Particularly as a self employed person, that's important because you know, if you've built you've you know, build a project wrong in the sense of you didn't ask for enough money and it takes more time than you thought it that you want to know that, right, So I recommend it for those those practical reasons. Yeah. No, just it doesn't have to be perfect. I mean, most the entries ice spreadsheets, most of the entries on mine say stuff like work, and if I want to know specific projects, I might put the name of the project, or then I'd say kids, clean up, sleep, read, you know, drive, like those are the categories basically, and so it doesn't take that much effort to write them down. I think where people go arise and they're trying to be too granular about it, I think good enough. Yeah, like I've read eighteen pages of real symbol and then I switched to you know, cooking. Le t is not that interested in of my life, you know. So yeah, and maybe every Some people do well with having some sort of trigger that reminds them to write down what they've done since the last trigger. So, I mean, it could be if you're sitting at your desk, like when you get up to take a bathroom break, I may say you don't have to track that, but that could be the time that you then write stuff down. Or it could be that you do it at lunch, you do it at the end of the day, you do it before you go to bed, right, that would be three times you can remember what you did since the last time. If you do it three times a day, maybe I should commit to that. I have trouble at the end of the day doing anything though, Even that you do it in the morning, I could probably Yeah, I'll do as long as you maybe morning and then like when I get home from work, and those two would be enough to couple together the important points. Yeah, but I found it worthwhile. So I don't know people here all. I think it's interesting and I'm just really interested to kind of see how things change as we have different age kids and as we had the baby. And yeah, I think that's why I'm doing it now, sort of for the before people before and after us exactly. No, I mean I can see from that. I tracked my time occasionally here and there over the years, and I tracked my time in winter or early spring of twenty fourteen. It was before I got pregnant with my fourth child, and so I had my daughter was like two, not even two and a half at that time, and I can see that she was just sleeping better than my two year old and my life front then it does. So it's just it helped me see it's not all in my head like that, this is actually you know sometimes, Yeah, I can see how that would be useful. I read my own blog sometimes for that particular reason, like image sugarcoating this, and then someone's the answer is, yeah, yeah you are, because actually you were complaining like create like myself, you know, So it's interesting so this is just another another mode. Well, this has been our Planner Palooza Episode twenty. Hopefully Sarah's going to post photos of her various planners stuff on either her blog the shoebox that's shu remember for her name box dot com or on the Instagram Best of Both Worlds. Yeah, I'll have to you know what, I'll schedule a post in advance, because again, this is going to be in my just a week or two after having a new baby. So but yes, I will definitely post some pictures and we will be back. We'll be back next week of more. Thanks so much for tuning in. This has been best of both worlds. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both Worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.