Weekly or Daily? Choosing the Right Planning View
The weekly versus daily debate never really goes away; it simply waits until your current inserts start irritating you. Or is that just a me thing?
One of my favorite things about using a ring planner is that if when your planning style changes, you do not have to stage a dramatic farewell to all of your inserts. You simply pop open the rings (correctly...using the tabs!) and try something else.
The weekly versus daily question comes up regularly for me, and the answer is usually: both work well until they don’t.
A weekly layout is excellent if you like seeing an overview of the whole week at once. Appointments, deadlines, and commitments sit together in one place, which makes it easier to judge whether a given day is already too ambitious before adding three more things to it.
A weekly spread can also encourage restraint; when space is limited, you tend to write down what matters the most, rather than brain dumping everything in your head.
The difficulty comes when real life refuses to stay neatly inside a small box. A week that looked perfectly manageable on Monday morning can become crowded by lunchtime on Wednesday, leaving arrows, squeezed notes, and increasingly creative handwriting in the margins.
A daily layout solves that problem by offering more space; sometimes glorious amounts of it depending on what size you are in. There is room for tasks, notes, phone calls, reminders, and whatever else appears halfway through the day demanding attention.
For busy or unpredictable schedules, daily pages often feel more forgiving because they accept that some days simply need more room than others. Of course, daily pages have their own weakness. It is possible to become so focused on today that the end of the week is suddenly in your face without warning.
That is why many people eventually find themselves using both types of layouts in some form...a weekly view for perspective, and a daily page for drilling down into the details. One tells you where the week is heading; the other helps you survive the day.
In the end, the best format is the one that helps you keep track of real life with the least amount of friction. A planner does not earn extra credit for looking beautifully structured if by Thursday you are writing reminders on scraps of paper because your layout has stopped cooperating.
So, are you naturally a weekly planner, a daily planner, a "little bit of both" planner, or someone who keeps changing depending on what life currently looks like?
As usual on Fridays, feel free to discuss anything ring planner related.
I really need an "I like" button for these posts. I used to be a daily planner before I moved into a Filofax, but ever since I've got my first Filofax (in 2012), I've been a weekly planner. The main reason for it is that I do need the whole year at once in my planner. From yearly subscriptions, medical check ups, uni semester plans and all the way to my yearly trips and work tasks, having the whole year is a must. And also, as the year progresses, being able to refer to past weeks and months to calculate when was the last meeting on some topic, has proven to be critical.
ReplyDeleteThankfully, I found myself able to adapt easily to different formats and sizes of planners (A5 to Personal, to A5 to Personal again), and I'm less prone to switch. I guess I could move to a daily layout - I experimented with bullet journaling for a while (one year in a notebook and about 2 or 3 in my A5 Malden) - but like you have mentioned, I do like to have the overview granted by a weekly layout. I like to be able to plan, with sufficient time. As result, my other calendars are a monthly (Plotter) but also a yearly, fold-out Filofax calendar, to get a better grasp of how much time I'm devoting (or not) to certain topics.
Oh dear, I am at the loss right now. The only weekly insert that works fine for me ist the landscape one. I need a diary with appointments. But with this one I have no place for my tasks and have to turn the filofax every time. The advantage of having every appointment of the whole year all in one place gets lost with the other option: the dailies. Everything feels a bit more torn. Adding a monthly means deciding what to put on that with its even smaller space offering. That seems less an solution for the overview, more for forward planning. And combining weekly and daily makes me fear to get lost in transition ;-)
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