More on Planning: What Do You Plan?

Last week my besties and I tackled the question "why do you plan" (in the "using planners" sense).  This week the question is "what do you plan?"

What are the actual things you want planners/planning and journals for and to keep up with?

It seems like such an obvious thing - what do you plan?  Uh, my life?  But of course that's way too broad.  "My life" doesn't tell me if I just need a weekly calendar and I'm good, or if a bullet journal system would make more sense, or if I want or need to track habits, or if I'm keeping up with my knitting differently than I am my work projects, or...

Anyway, "my life," while technically accurate, is a completely useless answer to the question of what I want to plan.

So let's dig into more detail.  In no particular order, I either do plan, or want to plan:

Work projects.  I work in Organizational Development for a 4.5K employee company.  I'm the project owner for things like succession planning and annual performance reviews.  I'm working with a team of 3-5 people, and we're all across the country.   This means that we need a way to easily keep aligned with our progress, and to not lose sight of the details.   We're using Trello for project tracking, and it's working very nicely.

Actual Project Plan

Weekly and Daily Focus.   In my ideal world, I'd spend about 30 minutes every Monday morning, and then at least 15 minutes every other day getting my shit together for the coming week or the day ahead.   What are my major priorities this week?  What do I need to focus on today?  When am I meant to be on that conference call?  When does the current Quidditch Match in the House Cup end?  I have a digital calendar (well, two, actually.  I have a Google calendar that I rarely look at or bother with, and then my Outlook calendar that runs my work-life).  Anyway, every morning I'll look over my calendar and write my appointments into my planner.  It's completely redundant, and probably unnecessary, but that whole "writing it down makes it real" thing?  I think it genuinely improves the odds of me showing up where I'm supposed to be.  Once my appointments are recorded, I'll take a stab at generating my to-do list.  (At least that's the ideal.  The reality is, I'll start and then get interrupted five times, and then I'll finish filling the list in with at 2:30 in the afternoon with what I've done.  It's an imperfect system.)

Rough Outline of a Weekly Plan

My Knitting.   Come on, you knew that was coming.  I do a little of my knitting planning in Ravelry itself (Ravelry is amazing and has changed my knitting life.)  I do use the "Queue" feature to map out projects that I'd like to start in the nearish future.  I generally don't add something to the queue unless I already have the yarn and I really mean it about casting it on.   And then I end up moving things back out of the queue when mood or whimsy moves me.

But let's break this down a little farther, because there are lots of different aspects of my crafting life that I plan around.

• What do I want to knit (or crochet, or weave, or sew) next, soon, coming up, etc.?
• The Harry Potter Knit and Crochet House Cup -- how will I fit what I want to knit into the Cup's prompts?  How am I going to actually bust out 1000 or more points in a Term?  (I feel good about it this Term, people.  I'm focused.)   
• Yarn.  Yarn, you guys.  What do I want to make with the yarn I already have?  What do I want to make that I don't have yarn for?  (Shockingly, with as big as my stash is, occasionally I don't have the right thing in stock.)   I did a whole post on shopping for fiber festivals and how to plan for that back in 2015. 
• Gifts.  I like to knit.  I have friends and family who either love to receive hand-knits or who were foolish enough to pretend to love it in order to spare my feelings, and now we're trapped in this charade for eternity.

I wasn't kidding about liking stickers.

So those are (some) of the things I plan.  You'll no doubt have noticed an utter lack of mention of things like grocery shopping or housekeeping.   That should probably tell you where my priorities lie.  Carl and I do sit down and menu plan every week, but other than that we have just have some routines that bump along.  The whole thing needs more attention but, whatever, I'm busy knitting socks.

I do not have a perfect system.  I have an imperfect hodge-podge of systems, and I'm constantly looking to reinvent or tweak what I'm doing.   Part of the reason for these blog posts is to verbally process what I'm doing now (or what I want to be doing now) with an eye towards making decisions about how to proceed in 2019. 

Now, if you were to asking me about tracking (as opposed to planning)... well that would be a whole different blog post.