My Planner Funk

I am currently having a planner crisis which is partly why I thought it was a good idea to restart the blog.

I am going to have to majorly change the way I plan my life. I have been honing my planning style for a while to try and manage all the craziness in my life. I was finally getting close to what I needed in my day to day planning to be productive and to manage my mental health. Then, typically, there is a spanner thrown in the works…. GDPR

Now to those of you who are not in Europe, you may not be aware of GDPR – it is the new data protection law affecting the EU. Now this affects me in a professional capacity, and the way it affects my planning is that essentially at the end of each academic year all notebooks, diaries, planners etc that reference our day to day work need to be shredded.

You can probably imagine my face when we this came up in the staff meeting as I was taking notes in my hand coiled Erin Condren Life Planner/Notebook hybrid! (Don’t panic – I’ve managed to save it!).

So here’s how I have been planning…

I have my bullet journal. This is the hub of everything where I record all notes, incoming tasks, plan out projects – anything you can think of I probably record in my bullet journal (this is why I fill them in 1-3 months). Then I have my Passion Planner which allows me to space out my time over the week and helps me visually see what is realistic to get done each day. Then I have a pretty planner – the pretty stickery type things that I like to include in my planning. This has mainly been an Erin Condren, but I’ve tried Happy Planners as well. I also have a journal/planner. Oh and there’s a teacher planner!

This has been working well, and while there is a bit of overlap, I do need to see sometimes records of things in my bullet journal that include data that would mean it needs shredding under the new rules. Also my teacher planner would need shredding! Oh no. I do look back at them to see what we were doing around the same time and for ideas. Plus  its an Erin Condren teacher planner! No. Not going in the shredder.

Now I have been able to make some quick changes to save current lovely planners and be able to manage the final half term of the year.

But… this now leaves the problem of what I do from September. I know essentially everything I want to keep has to be generic and completely anonymised,  but there is still the issue of day to day planning.

This may not seem like much to you as you read this. You may be thinking that it isn’t that much of a crisis, but the way I plan is how I manage my mental health so it is a big deal. I have to find a new way to plan that still allows me to see everything that is going on in my life, but that now separates work and non-work.

I know its possible but its not going to be an easy journey!