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FLOW WELL
The shortcut
It’s a three-year monthly calendar. A half-size notebook where the lay-flat spread is a full month, one page per month, three years of them in one book. I keep two: one for life, one for meals, and I run them side by side.
Why three years instead of the calendars you already own? Because I’m always planning further out than they reach. The dentist you book a year ahead. The summer trip you’re mapping in November. A three-year book gives all of that somewhere to live instead of rattling around in your head.
Easiest place to find them is on Amazon (search “three-year monthly calendar planner”). There are plain professional ones and beautiful hardback ones. There are tiny ones and there are big ones. These are the actual ones I’m using right now: Plain One and Pretty One
Extra hack: I use an erasable pen when writing in these – because obviously things can change over time. And pencil is just a mess. Extra fine point refillable erasable pens is where it’s at for calendar planning! Try these (my fave) – they also come in COLORS for those that like a pretty planner.
Why paper, when I’m all about the tech these days
White space on the page means the day is open. And the second I can see that at a glance, I feel calmer and know that there’s room for whatever I’m working on next. No tapping into every single day on my phone to figure out where I have room. I just look down and see it.
When I’m planning rather than reacting, a digital calendar can be overwhelming. I can really only see one day at a time on my phone, and even on a big screen the text gets cut off. When I need to plan something further out, say a dentist appointment for one of my kids, I want the whole week in front of me so I can find the day with space. My kids are sensitive to doing more than one thing in a day, so if there’s soccer that night, that’s not the day. Paper does the one thing my phone can’t. It shows me the shape of the month all at once.
And I’m not anti-tech (I promise). I use my Google Calendar in parallel. I have a hundred tricks and apps for running my day-to-day (more on that later – I’m looking at you Todoist!) But I share a Google calendar with my husband, so my digital view is my stuff plus his plus a few other calendars all layered on top of each other. I like keeping my real stuff clean in the paper book. Once a month I do a true-up between the two. When something new comes up while I’m sitting in my office, I add things to both at once. Away from my desk, I put it in the digital calendar and catch the paper at the next true-up (with a reminder to actually do the true-up, because otherwise I might forget lol). Paper stays for the big stuff. Trips, appointments, plans. And the digital one gets loaded with all the smaller stuff.
How it started
For years I printed out a blank calendar page every single month and filled it in by hand, even with Google Calendar right there. I just need to see the whole month on one page. How it’s spaced out, weekdays versus weekends, how many times a week I’m actually getting to yoga. One day at a time on a screen doesn’t give me that. So one day I thought: I do this every month, why don’t I just buy a book. So I bought a basic calendar book.
Then I hit the wall every planner hits. School-year calendars end in June. Regular calendar years end in December. By early winter I’m already planning summer, sometimes further, and those months don’t exist yet in some books. So the appointment stays in your head, or you leave yourself a note to write it down once you finally have a calendar that reaches that far. Then I found out three-year calendars are a thing. (They make five-year ones too, but three made me feel a little less like a psycho.) Three years of dated monthly pages, one slim book, because it’s only a page a month. My Type B friends (I’m looking at you Adrienne) could not comprehend, but for my Type A brain it was a sigh of relief.
Then I bought a second one, for dinner
I realized I was doing the same thing for my monthly meal plan – printing out a blank calendar and filling it in monthly. Seeing it all at once lets me balance things out, so we’re not eating chicken three days in a row, and I can write “tacos” on every Tuesday and be done. Fewer boxes to fill in, less overwhelming.
I kept the old printed out calendars so I could look back at past meal plans so as not to reinvent the wheel every month. What did we eat last month? What did everyone actually like? And then copy the winners forward. Summer eating is nothing like winter eating, so pulling up what we ate last June beats guessing from last month. And now the two notebooks sit side by side. Soccer on Tuesday means an easy early dinner. Date night already on the calendar for Friday means pizza for the sitter. The meals just key off the life I’ve already got planned.
The part I didn’t see coming
As I said, I’m the stereotypical Type A. I like knowing what’s coming as far out as I can, and honestly, I like having things to look forward to. So the calendar ended up doing more than just keeping me organized. I’d look a few months ahead, see empty pages, and think: room. Room for a trip, room to go see someone. And when a month is already covered in writing, I know I’m done saying yes. So the white space kind of tells me when there’s room to reach for something, and when to protect what’s left. It only works for me because I can SEE it on the page.
If you want to try it
This is for the paper person. If you’re happily all-digital, more power to you, I’m not going to switch you (though the meal one might get you anyway if the meal planning apps aren’t working for your family’s needs). But if you’re already a girl that loves paper and you’re frustrated because you can’t get everything out of your head and onto the page, because the page keeps running OUT, that was me. I wanted it out of my brain and into a format I could “see” across time. I kept having to hold things or leave myself reminders about the dentist appointment six months out. This fixed it. Like I said above, things can change so I use an erasable pen so nothing is locked in. That was another key to making this system work for me.
The easiest way to start is just to put in what you already know. Birthdays, standing appointments, the trips you’ve booked. Then pull up your school’s calendar and dump the whole year in at once. That’s the fastest way to fill the pages, and to feel how much you’ve been carrying around that you didn’t even know you were still holding. And SEE where there might be space between sporting events or appointments for you to just BREATHE (or take a trip).
Before you go
Paper girlie or fully digital? Type A or Type B? And what’s the one thing stuck in your head right now that needs to get onto a page? I’m testing out some digital meal planning things lately that MAY get me to give up my dinner notebook, but I’m not there yet. I’ll keep you all posted when I’m ready to give it up.
Talk soon,
Kristen ❤️
I love this! I’m rediscovering the power of paper as well, I’m currently managing ok out of Asana (that’s just a glorified task list), but love your suggestion on using a 3 year timeframe to get ahead of the school year challenges!
I use both paper and tech, but my dinner planning is all paper. I've been printing monthly sheets for years, and then store them in page protectors in a binder. Why did I not think of a monthly planner for this? Great idea!