252: Intentionally Flexible Planning: A Planner That Works for Your Brain

Welcome, or welcome back to the Joy Loving Home podcast.

We are in the middle of a five-episode series in which we are building ourselves a runway to be able to take off in 2026 smoothly in a way that hopefully will help us to be a little more successful with our aims and goals and plans for the year. So if you have missed any of those, this whole series starts on episode 250. The first day we talked about our five W's and sort of just getting our brain around why or why not we do the things we do. The second day we zeroed in on...

Just having fun dreaming. If we wanted to have a word of the year, if we wanted to have visual reminders of that, if we wanted to create a 26 for 26 list, which I highly recommend over any kind of resolution. Quick note on that. I have mentioned many times before on this podcast, another podcast that is called Happier with Gretchen Rubin. It happens to be that today she dropped her episode all about the 26 for 26 list, which is where I learned about it.

That is episode 568. And I will try to link that in the show notes. But in case I forget, after you're done listening here, you might want to pop over and listen to again, the podcast is called Happier with Gretchen Rubin. And she has this episode is on her 26 for 26 list. So it's a great way to listen in way more detail than I have been sharing. All right. Also, today I want to dig into a very specific way that I think is

best when we try to plan for our brains. If you are anything like me, you have tried every single planner out there on the market, and then some expensive ones cheap ones decorative ones basic ones bullet journals which is probably the stretch of time I had the best luck but then we all go through seasons and that whole setup of my bullet journal was just I wasn't feeling it this year and so I am working inside of a it's lovely but

It's a basic planner that I purchased to target. It's from the sugar. Hold on, I've got it in front of me. It's the sugar paper brand. And I'm going to dig into why the way I plan will work in any planner, even just a notebook if you want to grab one. But I'm going to dig into the points that I think are essential for our brains to latch on and to utilize and to stay successful with are just the best planning for our brains.

And I call it being intentionally flexible with our planning because we never know what kind of day we're going to have and I don't know about you but in my life no two days look alike so the fact that we have these very elaborate planners where they believe all of our days are the same even similar is just not the way my world works and I'm guessing probably not yours either so But stay tuned for how this works right after this.

A wise person once said, Everybody is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it's stupid. Well, Fish, quit trying to climb trees while getting advice from well-intentioned monkeys. It's time to jump in the water and learn how to swim with the current of your life. I'm Joy, a professional organizer, mom of four, and fellow Fishbrain.

If you're looking for a place to get understanding, encouragement, and ideas for your home that actually fit how your brain thinks, then I'm glad you're here. Let's ditch the type A advice and embrace what makes our brains and our homes unique. Together, we could have a joy-loving home.

Before I jump right into explaining this, I should share that because podcasting is not a visual medium, I will post pictures of what my monthly spread and my weekly spread look like, and just my planner in general, inside of my free community. And if you would like to see the visual of this, you can go to bit.ly slash joylovinghomecommunity and it will bring you to my free community, which is hosted on Facebook.

If you're not a Facebook person, I am going to, I hesitate to say things because then my follow through isn't always fabulous, but I may actually drop this in my Instagram as a photo as well. So if you're curious to find me there, go to instagram.com slash joylovinghome and give me a minute because I'd, have not posted on there in so long, it may take me a beat to figure out how to post again. We all get rusty. But yeah, I might challenge myself to get that out there as

well. But for sure, it will be in my free community. All right, let's jump into how this works. So like I said, I call the type of planning I do, the intentionally flexible planner.

And it will honestly work with any planner that so if you've already purchased your planner this year, do not kick yourself, You can conform your planner to work for you. It does not have to be the boss of you just because the lines and things are already in there. You can participate in any part of your planner that you're excited about, and you can ignore parts that don't interest you. And you can scroll out words and put new ones down on headings.

It's really okay. You own it. You get to do what you want to with it. So let me just sort of break down the things that I think are key points that are important. And number one, and the most important thing is, please do not stress about aesthetics. I think when we purchase these expensive, beautiful planners, we get so panicked that we're going to mess them up that we don't use them in a way that they should be used. So kind of get over it.

I will share that there are times when I can write beautifully. I'm a former teacher. I have beautiful penmanship when I want to. I can write in calligraphy. I've got all of that down in my planner. It is the most scrabbly chicken scratch you've ever seen because I purposely need to make it unfussy. I need it to be just a workhorse and I hope that I can give you permission for that. All right. Second, I personally always, always, always use a pencil.

Life is constantly changing. So if you are struggling to get over the aesthetic piece of it, and then you put an appointment down, and then somebody gets sick, and you can't get the appointment, you got to scratch that out, you got to say cancel, you got to move it over. If that stuff stresses you out, use pencil. It's a beautiful thing that was invented with an eraser. So those are sort of two things I do. If that works for you, great.

If you're like, the whole reason I did this is I wanted the cute stickers and I wanted the colorful pens and I wanted to make it pretty, cool. You do you. I'm just saying... Don't stress if you start that way and then you fall off of it. You can always start back up again. I have done various versions of like color coding family members or color coding events or writing it all in pencil, then highlighting it with highlighters after the fact when I knew what my colors were.

You can do all the things. None of it is wrong. I'm going to point out the key points and then your how, as I explained on episode 250, your how is up to you. Nobody is policing your how. I'm just going to tell you why the things I'm teaching you right now I think are really, really important. Okay, so the first step is each month you would open the month page and you need to get down the important events right away so that you can kind of work

through the structure of when everything else might happen. I love when I do pick out my planners to find something that has a notes box or a notes column or a notes row or somewhere where I can be brain dumping as I'm putting things on the calendar because I don't want to find another page or find another scrap paper or lose my scrap paper or do whatever.

So if there's a notes section within that calendar page, to me, that's a winner when you're picking something out if you happen to have not pictures out yet.

Okay, so the things, obvious things that you would put on here, if anybody's having birthdays or anniversaries or, you know, special events like that, if you have any doctor's appointments laid out or, when your kid's school starts back up or if there's a teacher workday, things like that obviously are going to be important if any, you know, family members traveling in and out of town, Whatever.

Obviously, all of those things are going to help you see the structure of days that have actual events and days that are just yours to do what you're going to do with. So that is, I want you to look at dates as things. If they're time-bound, there is a structure to that day. And any white space, hooray, that's yours to see. That's all I deal with on my monthly. I don't do any kind of task planning or to-dos or anything like that on my monthly spread. Okay, so that kind of covers monthly.

Then we go into the weekly. And what I love about my weekly spread, and it can be vertical rows or horizontal rows or all the things, like it can be however your calendar looks,

there are three points that I like to have in any weekly spread is there is the segment that covers the actual date, the Monday through Sunday or the Sunday through Saturday, however yours is laid out. And then whether I have to carve it out by drawing a line or whether it happens to have separation of places where you would have time bound things and notes, I like to have my pending list and my tackled area. And.

That's all I worry about. And I look at it as a week. I don't look at each day individually. So the first thing you do is you take anything that was time bound from your monthly and you put it down on those dates. So for instance, in this particular week, my daughter had a doctor's appointment on Monday and a different type of doctor appointment on Tuesday.

I wrote those down and immediately because time bound things I am bound to, especially when it involves things like other people or professionals or things like that. So I got those down. I don't have anything else actually timed out on the rest of the week. So those were just my Monday and Tuesdays are there. Then I have my list of I break mine into personal versus work, just because that's how I like to categorize. You can categorize any way you want.

So personal covers things like, you know, stuff I wanted to get done for my health this week, stuff I wanted to get done for my home this week, stuff I needed to do for my family, stuff because it's the beginning of a new year and we're trying to maybe pin down some vacations and I need to make some phone calls based on how to do a vacation in July, but I need to make calls today.

Not today, but anytime this week. So anything that I would like to get done this week, it's like a secondary brain dump. So you can look at all those notes you made on your monthly page and if anything you're like, oh, oh, I should do this and this this week, move them over to the brain dump that is in front of you for that week. Ideally, the month is there to just kind of glance at, but your planner would sort of stay open somewhere in your face all the time that you walk by with

your weekly spread open because that's all you have to worry about. Then you're the flexibility begins. Like, you can go, oh, okay, well, she's got to be at the doctor's appointment at 1030, but it's almost an hour away. And so really, the whole first half of the day is gone. And so is there anything I hope that I'll do in the afternoon? And for me, it was like, I still needed to take a bunch of the Christmas decorations apart and sort of get them ready to go back into storage.

So I didn't write that down as a to-do. I don't do to-dos. I just have that type of thing in my pending list. And then what I do on that day is I write down anything that was actually tackled. And this to me is the ding, ding, ding, most important part of an ADHD planner is that you write down the things that you completed as those tasks where you would normally default to people who tell you write down everything you want to do, write down your top three.

Write down your most important one thing you have to get done today. Life happens all the time. Our energies are different all the time. We may chase a whim and get five things done that are so unnecessary and not the one thing. And then we think we're failures because we didn't get the one thing down that we said we had to do that day. We're over that. Your tackled list is your way to celebrate yourself, to honestly just prove to your brain that you do stuff.

We have this narrative rolling in our heads that we can't ever get anything done, even though we...

Thought we were busy all day. So if on Monday, and if you want to like retroactively attempt this, go for it. You might not remember as well, but give it a go. Retroactively think back, did I do anything on Monday? For me, I actually got all of the Christmas stuff down. By that, I mean, nothing's left on the walls. Nothing's left on the porch. Nothing's left anywhere. Like the trees were collapsed. The ornaments were back in boxes.

All that's not put away. All that was still sitting around, but it's down. That's a huge accomplishment. So I wrote that I took care of that. I also, and this is sort of like a side note bonus thing if you want, I create a little grid for myself of the things I'm trying to track, that data I'm trying to pick up on myself. I have goals of doing better for my health and doing better for my brain in the way of a hobby and in the way of, for me, my own spiritual practice.

So I am tracking to see each day that I do my devotion, each day that I do an exercise, and I have made myself my own reward system of if I exercise, I get to do a watercolor practice. So I am tracking all of that. It's not a, yeah, you did it and whoa, you messed up. It's how did that week go? Gosh, I actually worked out four days this week and I did four watercolor practices this week. Wow, go me.

Wonder what would make it be five next week or is four really good for me because that's really all I can carve out. Or later in the month, I might figure out I only did it twice and why. Wonder what was going on in my world. Like it's data. It's data that you can interpret based on watching the ebb and flow of your life. We are not all the same every single day. And so that is not to punish myself. That is not for me to be like, well, I didn't do it every day.

So now that resolution is over. That's why I don't do resolutions. Treat yourself like your own. Life is an experiment. Life is a grand adventure. You're taking travel notes and data along the way. There are ups and there are downs in life. All of it is okay. That's sort of the viewpoint I want you to have. But that tackled list is so important because I want your brain to get the dopamine hits that you are accomplishing things.

So as a secondary example, on Tuesday, I carved out the appointment with my

daughter, and then I put down the things that I accomplished. Oh, on my tackled list, I should also say on Monday, I have that I recorded and published episode 250. On Tuesday, I put that I recorded and accomplished episode 251. I am doing 252 now, so I will be putting that on my tackled list as soon as I hit publish in about 30 minutes. If you think you're with some perfectionist person who pre-batch records podcasts and gets them out in some structured way, you're at the wrong podcast.

Mine are instantaneous. So it is, you get what you get, but I hope you can enjoy them and go on this ride with me. But anyway, what I did on Tuesday was I recorded and published episode 251. That was like my work tackled. And then my personal tackled is I got all of that Christmas stuff that was sitting around everywhere down to the basement. It is not stored away, but it was one more step. And that's okay. To me, that was still an accomplishment because now I can move

around on my main floor and Christmas is gone. And that feels great. My goal today, and I say goal, like I, this is my intention. I don't know if it'll accomplish it or not. And I won't write it down until it's tackled. But I want to vacuum all those spaces that have all the little glitter and the bits of pine and all the different things, that's my intention. I will or I won't get to it, but I won't write it down on that tackled until I sit down this evening and I pull my planner out and I.

Log what happened today. And I just, for me, my planner is about looking at it in the morning to remind my brain what should be front of mind and sitting down in the evening and logging what did or didn't happen. And if it had nothing to do with my intention that morning, but I still did stuff, that all gets logged and we get credit for every piece of that. Okay. I feel like I'm just rambling now. I think you get the point.

The only other piece I wanted to share is I am not great at meal planning. It is something I'm trying to investigate in the new year. So what I am doing right now is instead of writing a plan of the meals I want to eat, I'm logging what we ate. Because if I want to then later think of a plan, maybe I'll just open it up

and go, I could just redo this week. It's kind of already there. We did this once. We could do it again. That kind of thing. So I just write down for my knowledge what we ate that day. And that helps me kind of start to think about the whole meal plan journey, but I'm at the very beginning of it and I like to take things in baby steps. Final thought, if you're saying, but Joy, I'll forget to look at my planner.

I'll forget that I'm even doing this. I've tried and then I'll leave weeks and weeks and weeks at a time blank. I don't know what to tell you. It's going to happen. It's going to happen. We ebb and flow in life. That's who we are as fish brain people.

But what I will say is digital calendars, if that is your thing, then let that be your thing. If for me, a digital calendar is as good as out of sight of out of mind, and maybe I will get to the step one day where I do all this stuff on paper because that feels really good and soothing to my brain. And then I will input it all into a digital calendar so that I can take advantage of things like alerts and notifications.

But for now, my sort of patch between these two worlds is that when I glance at my calendar in the morning, if I know there are time-bound things that will go on, I will open up the timer alarm section on my phone and I will create alarms. I don't know if you realize this, but you can label any alarm. So for instance, yesterday I was doing all my Tackle at Tuesdays with my membership group and we met at 10 and 1 and 3 and 7.

And so I have alarms set for myself at 9.55 and 12.55 and 2.55 and 6.55 that say, start session. That way, when the alarm goes off and I'm like, what did I set that for? I can look down and go, oh, yeah, we're about to start a session. Let me go get myself set up with my Zoom so that I can work with my group.

You can make yourself alarms for anything, to remember to take medications, to remember to go to an exercise class, to remember to walk your dog if you got a new dog and they need to go to the potty on a regular basis. Alarms are a beautiful thing. So sometimes I remember to do this. Sometimes I don't. But that is my sort of hybrid attempt to take advantage of technology. Use it or don't.

All right. I think that was everything I wanted to share. I'll put links to show notes in the show notes before I hit publish here. And again, you can see this photo later today in the free community, which is bit.ly slash joylovinghomecommunity. And you can email me anytime, joy at joylovinghome.com, if you have thoughts about how all this works. All right, until next time, which is tomorrow, continue to choose joy.