Audio Transcript:
A great thing about your In-View Monthly Planner is that you can start using your system any day of the year. On more than one occasion, I have bought planners or calendars late in the year, like October, which were only good for three months. I bought them anyway because I happened to need a planner now, not in three months, but what a waste of money and paper!
So, it’s great that you can start the In-View System whenever you want to. The downside is that you have to fill in the days of each month, but that goes pretty quickly.
To set up your In-View Monthly Planner, you just need three things: your minimalist yearly calendar (each side has a different year, so make sure you’re looking at the correct year), your In-View Monthly Planner, and a pencil. The process is pretty self-explanatory, but here’s one way to do it.
- You start on whatever month it is. This one starts in January, so on the cover I’ll write January, 2024, through December, 2024, because it’s a twelve-month planner.
- Since our first month is January, I’ll write in at the top, “January 2024.”
- And then I’ll fill in the days quickly.
- I start by filling in the first day and last day of each month, then the Sundays, and then the rest of the days.
- Filling in the first day, the last day, and Sundays in advance keeps me from making mistakes. Mistakes are rare, but they happen, so if you get to a Sunday and you were expecting some other day, you know you messed up. But since you’re using a pencil, there’s no problem.
There’s some work here, but it actually goes fairly quickly. As a test, I filled out a Monthly Planner this morning, and it took me about seventeen minutes to do the whole year. However, you may want to fill in just a few months if you’re in a hurry to get started.
How do I use this planner?
Each morning I follow the first To-Do on my Daily Page: “Plan Day: Check Monthly Planner & Weekly To-Dos.” So let’s take a few seconds to bring the big picture into focus.
First, I’ll glance quickly at today in my Monthly Planner. That’s where I see things like it’s trash day, and I have a dentist appointment at 1 pm. (At this point, I might say to my phone, “Okay Google, set an appointment for 12:30 pm called go to Dentist.”) And I see that it’s my brother’s birthday, and that it’s my last day to cancel my free subscription, or I see a reminder to call my molder today to check when my parts will be ready. Most of this would have fallen through the cracks. Instead, I see it first thing in the morning, and I put it on my Daily Page.
Next, I flip up the Daily Page to scan my Weekly Page. I have some to-dos, projects, and things to focus on for this week. I’ll add some of them to my Daily Page if I have time to work on any of them today.
By the way, usually I eventually get around to entering important appointments into Google Calendar, which has alarms and allows my employees to see my Google Calendar. But I always enter things into my In-View Planner immediately because it only takes a few seconds. Entering things into Google Calendar is a lot slower for me, so I tend to do it periodically, as a mini project.
In a nutshell, this wonderful little planner lets me enter my appointments, reminders, & commitments in just a few seconds, and also check them each morning in a few seconds. I can check quickly with no distractions, without going off on any tangents, as can happen on my phone or computer. And this little booklet is always handy, on the stand, when I plan.
The simplicity and speed of this monthly planner works really well for folks with ADHD like me, but, honestly, folks without ADHD, provided they are responsible adults, probably have some other system that they are used to that works well for them. Still, I encourage you to give this one a try because the system works really well when you use all the components together.
A couple of final thoughts. You’ll notice that I abbreviated the days of the week like this: SU for Sunday and TU for Tuesday, while the rest of the days of the week are all abbreviated with just one letter. Again, Sunday and Tuesday are the only days abbreviated with two letters: SU and TU. All the other days of the week have only one letter. We subtly suggest this method here.
Now, the decision to abbreviate the days of the week this way was the result of time trials filling out the calendar. It was the quickest way to write in the days of the week. However, if you just can’t get used to it, abbreviate the days your way.
You might also notice the little dotted lines on the bottom corner of the pages. We put these little dotted lines to remind you that you can snip off bottom page corners after months are completed. As you get deeper into the year, this helps you to flip instantly to the current month.