Okay, okay… I promise this is the last post about my swanky planner.  I’m obviously super proud of myself for this slightly mundane accomplishment and I appreciate your patience with my yapping about it.

Clearly I’ve been making fun use out of my planner — mostly enjoying sitting at Starbucks with the pup while organizing thoughts — but the real test will be whether I continue to use it beyond the next few weeks while it’s still shiny and new.

Pups helping get things organized at Starbucks

What I’m loving is the way I’ve broken everything down:

There are full month calendars from now until December 2013,

Month-at-a-glance pages to use for any big events or to dos of the upcoming month,

A page for birthdays, anniversaries, etc. with each month getting it’s own box,

Meal planning pages (which I am cheating and just printed without adding to my planner so I can make them messy and possibly give up on meal planning within a few weeks),

And of course each week is broken down into daily spots for to do lists and keep track of water/work outs which I think is pretty cool,

Weekly plans being made. Starbucks run? Check!

But the part I really love is the break down for the blog planner.

See all those boxes?!

I searched all over the interwebs and found a few that I liked (oh, Pinterest, how you occupy my time!), but none that covered everything I wanted to have.  So I broke down each post into sections to make lists of links, photos, tags, etc. to use for each posting.  At the end of each week I also have a section dedicated to “stats” which is mostly so I remember that this blog is for fun and not a business plan, and also so that when I compare my stats it is to my own and not to others who are using blogs for business and such.  The stats section also helps me remember to follow up on comments and new followers (which are always fun!).

So I think I’ve finally figured out how to make this work.  If you’re interested and want to use any part of this planner, I’ve posted all my pdf files here.  Now when you go to print these, I assume you’ll either be using your own printer or the services of a Kinkos-esque establishment.  Which might be easier as you’ll want to make sure you print them half pages or as “booklet” (except the weekly planner and blog planner) and then sit down to figure out which pages you want double sided with each other.  I went for the blog planner and weekly planners together and it worked out well, everything else is just month by month with month-at-a-glance on the backs.

It wouldn’t be a Turkification posting if there wasn’t a bit of a language barrier issue, right?  Right.  Well, at the printer we had some issues with getting the margins right because I had fudged with them a bit (more space in the middle to allow for center binding).  When we went to print and the kid asked me if I wanted it printed “fit mi? normal mı?” I should have said “normal”, but I didn’t quite understand the question — I know!  The problem is when I’m expecting Turkish and the words are English I just get confused and can’t figure it out sometimes… usually… okay, pretty much every time — and I said “fit”.  Which is not what you want.  Or wasn’t what I wanted anyway.  Luckily, in Turkey when something is being done all five guys working in the shop will cluster around the computer/printer/binding machine to ensure it works out perfectly.  And it did.  [Seriously though, this is a phenomenon I’ve only experienced in Turkey… and it’s everywhere, but my favorite is at the salon.  It’s a whole posting — or many — on it’s own, but suffice it to say I’ve never been to a salon in Turkey and had only one person working on my hair.  Ever.]

Enjoy and let me know if you have questions or requests!

And another one of the pups, because she’s just so stinking cute.