The Happy Planner 2018
I know, I know, it is 2019! But I wanted to share with you the planner I used in 2018. I am using the same brand of planners for 2019, but I am trying out a different style. I want to use it a few weeks before I tell you all about it so I know how it works for me! So let me share with you my 2018 planner and how it evolved over the year!
So to start with, the brand of planners I use are The Happy Planner. It is made by me and my BIG ideas. I first discovered these planners at Costco back in 2016 or 2017. I want to say it was later into 2016. I bought a box set from Costco. It was an 18 month DATED planner. Since it was a box set, it came with a lot of extras that I actually still have, ha! It came with a lot of stickers, some sticky notes, some washi tape, some pens, and I believe some folders. It could have even came with more, but that is all I can really remember. And I remember all of that because I still use all of those things! {I am making it a point this year to try and use stickers weekly.}
So I used that planner all through the end of 2016 and beginning of 2017. I really liked the style of the planner, and I loved that the sheets were so easy to remove or add. I bought some whole and half sheet paper to help with meal planning and making notes for my planner in general. I used to actually keep Melody’s schedule in my planner so that if ever someone babysat, I would just hand them my planner with the instructions.
So I loved that system so much, I invested in a new planner from the same company in 2018. This time I wanted to find a planner that better fit our schedule. Most planners start on Monday, but we really start our weeks on Saturday. We do all of our grocery shopping on Friday nights, so that is an easy day to start a new week on. Well a Saturday start was impossible to find, but I did find a Sunday start. To make it better, it was undated. I thought this was cool too, so I bought it. I could only find this type of planner from their website though. I am most positive I bought it around Black Friday because I know I had some sort of promo to help offset the cost.
In addition to the planner, I bought a new cover for the planner. I really didn’t use this at first. It was way too bulky. But as the year progressed, and my planner accessory collection, I found it was easiest to use the cover and keep everything together.
So my biggest complaint after receiving the planner was that there was not enough stickers to date everything. Sure it came with stickers to apply the months to the tabs, but I had to go through and handwrite the dates and months throughout the actual pages of the planner. This took quite a bit of time, and I also don’t always love my handwriting. So it made me kind of bummed. I made it work though. I just noted it for the future in case I ever bought another undated planner.
So now to start using my planner. So in the beginning of 2018, I continued to plan like I always did. I wrote everything in one color ink, I meal planned for the entire month, then I made grocery lists for each week. (I don’t really have all this documented, but you can check out my meal planning post to see what I mean.)
I realized this was just not going to work anymore. Now that Melody was eating real food, and Brad was diabetic and needed snacks and meals more planned out, I needed to plan more than just dinners.
The first thing I did was invest in a pen set. I wanted to color code everything within my planner to make things easier to read and make important things stand out. And of course I was in a bind when I did that because my cover could only hold one pen. But I did some research and found out that The Happy Planner had pen cases! YES! This was huge, and it helped me SO, SO much!
So I had some half page note pages that I would use for meal planning and grocery lists. I saw that The Happy Planner also had meal planning sheets, but before I invested in them, I wanted to see if that setup would even work. So I made my half pages mimic the meal planning pages. I did this for a few weeks to see if I would even like this setup. I mean the week still started on Monday on the meal planning sheets, so maybe I could make do with the half pages.
Well after a few weeks, I decide to just buy the meal planning pages. The system worked on the half pages, but it did not look near as nice. And the meal planning pages had some good benefits. Not only did it look cleaner, the back of the page had a spot for your grocery list. So each week I would list ALL of our meals on the front. This includes snacks. Then on the back, I would list ALL of the groceries needed to make ALL of those meals. Even things I knew we had, I wanted to note. This allowed me to make sure I had enough of whatever it was. And it also made sure that all my meals were accounted for.
Then I would use those half pages to make an actual grocery list. I would go through our pantry and fridge to check off anything we had, then I would put what is left on the half pages. Each week I shop the BOGOs from Publix, so I would make sure nothing we needed for the week wasn’t already covered by that. Then I would list what we needed from our grocery run at Walmart in the order of how we walk the store. That way I am not searching all over my list.
The only other thing I changed throughout the year were the discs that held together my planner. I noticed as the year continued that the planner was getting harder and harder to close. So I invested in the expander discs. Man that made a world of difference. It took a while and some effort to move everything over, but it was worth it in the long run.
If you want to get a better look at my planner from 2018, check out the video below. It shows a bit more of the planner itself.
I can’t wait to share with you the planner I bought for 2019. Just in the first two weeks it has been amazing. I want a little more time to get to know it before I share it though!
