Last year, I decided I needed a new planner for 2021. I wanted something different than I had been using. My old planner had received no love in 2020 (no surprise there) so I wanted to start 2021 fresh with something new.
I thought about all the things I liked about my old planner and all the things I didn’t like, and all the tasks and items I wanted to track and put in my planner. I previously used a weekly planner where each week was spread out over two pages, so each day really only had a couple of inches of blank space to write things down. I was finding that this was not enough room to write down everything I wanted.
So I set off in search of a planner that had more room to write everything. I specifically wanted one where each day had its own page. I also wanted a planner that had an hourly schedule so I could organize any meetings or appointments. I stumbled across the Ivory Paper Co. planner and thought it had everything I was looking for.
Why I picked this planner:
This planner had all the things I wanted to use and track this year:
- a box to track things that are due that day
- a box where I can track my walks and workouts
- an hourly schedule so I can write down all my meetings
- a section to track water intake
- a section to write down what I ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Thoughts on this planner after using it for a year:
I thought I would love this planner! As soon as I found the website I knew this planner had everything I wanted. However, I soon came to the realization that what I thought I wanted was not what I needed.
First off, the planner is a bit large. It is 10 inches tall and 8 inches across and is pretty thick, although that is to be expected since it is a daily planner. When I was working from home and it was sitting on my desk, it was fine. But for the past six months at least, I’ve been going into the office for about 3 days a week which means if I want to bring my planner to the office, I have to lug it in my bag.
I quickly came to the conclusion that this planner is too large for me to be carrying around everywhere. This means that on the days where I worked from the office, I would make notes in another little notebook about tasks that I completed or what I ate, or things I wanted to check off that were in my planner. It was just a lot of extra work so, as I plan to gradually shift back to working in the office full time, I don’t think I would get a planner this size again.
The Due Date box – I was super excited about this because I wanted a place to highlight my bills that were due so I wouldn’t forget about them. Well, I quickly realized that the only bills I actually pay manually are my rent, my student loan, and one credit card. Everything else is automated so I never had to remember to pay them. Only having three bills to manually pay each month left the due date box blank for most of the month. I then tried to use the due date box as more of a box to write down what I wanted to focus on that day cleaning wise and that worked out better. The box is a bit small to write down my cleaning routine but I like using it this way.
The meal tracking – I was so excited about this aspect of the planner and it was the main reason why I bought it. I wanted to track what I was eating every day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner so I could look back if I wanted to and remember good meals or just be cognizant of what I’m eating. But I quickly came to the conclusion that unless I wrote down what I ate right away, I usually wouldn’t write it down later and then I was stuck trying to remember what I had eaten (which was the whole point of tracking!). It was especially difficult when I wouldn’t have my planner on me, so then I was trying to make notes and then I would have to remember to transfer everything into my planner at the end of the day and it felt like it was more hassle than it was worth. Again, this is probably because I did not take my planner with me to work. If I did, I’m sure tracking my meals would have been much easier.
The water tracker – Again, I was wanting something visual to track how much water I was drinking and I thought the little water bottles that you could color in were perfect for this. As I’m sure you can guess, I found this tracking to be also a bit of a hassle mainly because I was not updating my planner every day. I would write down how much water I drank but then would not color in anything so that at the end of the week I was sitting there spending time coloring in like 60 water bottles. Again, this is more of a me problem, in that I did not update my planner every day. I think if I were on top of things and was writing down my meals and coloring in the water every day, this planner would have been amazing.
The hourly schedule – I thought I would use this section a lot to write down when all my meetings and appointments were. My main complaint about my other planner was that there was never enough space to write everything down. Apparently, I do not have as many meetings or appointments as I thought. Most days there was only one thing on my schedule that was at a specific time and a lot of the time this section went blank. It would seem that I do not really need that aspect of a planner.
Misc. things – The paper is fine. I did use a skinny Sharpie marker for some things and it bled through to the back page. Also, Saturday and Sunday do not have their own pages – they are on the same page. There is no meal tracking for Saturday or Sunday and there is only space to track one day of water. I wish the weekend days had their own pages.
Final thoughts:
Like I said, I thought I would love this planner because it had everything I was looking for. But unfortunately, I came to realize that most of it didn’t work for me either because I wasn’t updating my planner every day or because I realized I actually didn’t need everything that was on the page. I still think this is a great planner, and it’s one of the few I saw that had sections to track your meals and water. However, right now, I wouldn’t buy it again because it just didn’t work for me.
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