The Top 5 Reasons Daily Planners Keep You Organized

The Beginnings - Why a Daily Planner is Important to Your Daily Life

A daily planner is a tool that can help you make the most of your time. It can help you get your thoughts in order and plan out what you're going to do during the day. The planner helps you stay organized and on track with what you have to do.Some people think that a daily planner is just a waste of paper or a burden to carry around with them every day. They don't see the benefits of it and they don't want to take it seriously, but they are wrong. A daily planner should be taken seriously because it helps keep your life organized and on track so that you can get more done in less time, which means less stress too!

Today I have for you my top 5 reasons daily planners can keep you organized, keep you sane and give you control over your life.

#1. Appointment Booking - Making the Most of Your Time

Between responsibilities at work, managing the kids, keeping up with friends, and making time for ourselves to enjoy our own hobbies and interest, it is not surprising when important meetings and events get missed or double booked. Making the most of your time is an important skill for everyone to have. And creating a sense of balance is equally important. Using a daily planner can help make managing your life more efficient and also help you get more done.

Having a planner, either digital or physical, to track your appointments is key to staying organized and on top of things. You need to have a system in place so that you can see just how heavy your workload is and ensure you aren’t overloading yourself and creating a sense of burnout.

#2. Organization between Personal & Business Details

Being organized is a necessary part of life. It helps us to keep track of things and have a better overview of our personal and business life. I found that many women, most women in fact do not separate their planners between work and personal. Because there is only one of you, you have to find a balance between all that you do, and having separate calendars for each area of life can create opportunities for overload.

Personally, I resolved this issue in two ways.

First, I have only one task management app that I use for EVERYTHING. I selected a system that allowed me to create separate spaces for each area of my life. I have a space for all my personal tasks, a space for my SPICER Planner tasks, a space for my other business Channer Consulting (shameless plug), and then individual spaces for each of the clients I represent. Each time I create a task, I make sure to add it to its respective space and give it a due date so I can manage when things are expected.

Similarly for my calendar, I have one calendar that I open and use, but I color code my meetings and appointments so I know when something is work-related or personal. Doing so helps me to see everyone in one place and ensure I don’t schedule a work meeting during a time I am supposed to be taking one of my children to a doctor’s appointment. Doing this really saved my butt several times over.

#3. Accountability Helps You Achieve Goals Faster

I am a huge fan of accountability. At different times in my life and career, I have been a part of different accountability circles to help keep me motivated and focused on whatever goal I was going for at the time. Typically made up of a group of women I have grown to love and respect, they help to direct my priorities on what I said was important to accomplish.

In a sense, when you use a planner to document and track goals, it can be similar to having an accountability partner. When I put down a goal in my daily planner, every day that I open it up to write my tasks for the day I am reminded about what my goals are. I instinctively pause for a moment and reflect on where I am spending my time and attention recently. This visual reminder triggers me to ask myself, have I really put in the time and effort necessary to reach my goals recently. Thankfully my planner can’t give me the stink eye like my adoring accountability friends would do but that little reminder is just enough to cause me to reflect and

#4. Budget Tracker for Everyday Expenses and Goals

Okay while this isn’t a feature that we included in the first edition of the SPICER Planner, we do know the value of creating budgets, especially when you are trying to save money to accomplish a goal. A budget is a plan for spending and saving money. It is a way to organize your finances and track where your money goes. A budget can be as simple as making a list of all the things you spend money on in one month, or it can be very complex with categories, sub-categories, and monthly totals.

There are digital budget trackers that you can use that helps you keep track of how much you are spending so that you can stay within your budget goals. Some people use them to help them save more money by tracking their spending habits. Others use them to stick to their budgets even when they are on vacation or traveling because it's easier than carrying around receipts and doing the math in their heads.

The same way you can use a budget tracking to track your expenses, you can do the same with a physical planner. If you are saving money and adding funds to your account regularly, you can track that number each week so you can see the progress made. There are also planners that have space to track expenses, how much money you spend each day. This could be helpful to track work expenses that you need to track in order to submit a reimbursement report often.

#5. Being in Control of Your Own Schedule and Doing What Matters to You

The last benefit to share with you today is what I consider the most valuable and that is gaining control of your own schedule and gaining the opportunity to do what matters the most to you. When you allow others to determine your schedule and what your priorities are, you lose control over your time and where your attention is. When you plan out your activities you give yourself permission to create some boundaries and balance between what happens at work and what happens at home. You are able to schedule your own needs and activities as well as what others need from you. Yes, getting work items taken care if is important, no your 10 year old can’t drive himself to soccer practice, so there will always be items on your calendar that are for others, but when you control the boundaries of time and space around your life, it gives you a deeper sense of freedom and control and allows you to enjoy the ebbs and flows of your days so much more.

Now I am more than 100% sure that there are more benefits to using a daily planner than these 5 items, but I wanted to focus on these today. Managing your own calendar, syncing up your work and personal lives, creating moments of accountability, setting budgets and gaining control over your own schedule so you can do what matters to you I feel are solid reasons enough to invest in a good planner system right away.If you haven’t already done so, the SPICER Planner can be a great addition to your life to help gain all these benefits and much more. You can get your copy today on Amazon. And very soon the SPICER Planner website will have its own online store open for sales. Stay tuned for more news on that.

Until next time, drop a comment and let me know what you think. Do you have another reason why using a daily planner has made life easier for you? We would love to hear about it. Have a wonderful week and we will see you again soon.