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 ;-)
ReplyDeleteGood question! I’m more naturally a weekly planner, mostly because my life is very structured and repetitive so it seems a waste to write the same thing over and over. Yet I’m toying with dailies to keep jotted notes of things like my health. But I hate having that kind of stuff in my planner. But I need everything together. Yes I do have a problem, and yes I do have OCD, and it’s not ‘just right’ and that is an issue…
ReplyDeleteI have already created a 'split view' diary insert, using the two ring groups to hold separate diaries; a wo2p view for one group, and a 2ppd for the other: this allows you to see the week in overview, and each day in full. The problem is the number of pages for the daily inserts is obviously bigger than the weeklies, so you can get an asymmetric fill, but that can be addressed by only partly filling the daily section (I do this with my normal wo2p anyway, as I use a little 11mm ring Pocket). The half pages do tend to flop about a bit unless the holes are punched small (4mm).
ReplyDeleteNow I'm pondering how a fold-out wo2p might work (printed on a treble page, folded), inserted every seven days. You'd need 'notes' page to make the weekdays up to 8 to give a regular repeat (or use 2ppd diary), and then figure out whether to leave the back side of the weekly insert blank, or whether to alternate which side it sits, and print a week on each side.
Then there's the issue of how to compose, impose, print & crop it... May just have to bite the bullet and do it as two print jobs, and manually stuff the result; probably doing that anyway if only adding a 'moving window' of daily inserts...
Apologies for the rambling; just 'thinking out loud'...
The 3-ring split view sounds like a good option.
DeleteI am in the process of experimenting with two-ring stripes. Three rows 1.1/4" to 1.3/8" in Pocket, or two rows 1.7/8" in Mini format. However, even with 3.5mm hole size, there is significant wiggle/sag. So I'll have to try 3mm or even 2.5mm hole size for my next sets.
Hans
After a bit of scribbling, I think the best answer to what to put on the 'back' of the week view is to make it a different week view for the following week. This would then mean week view fold outs to left and right (maybe tasks/notes on one side, schedule on the other?), and day view in the middle, which can be flipped through day by day. To be able to find the weekly foldouts at each end of the week, you could use a removable post-it style tab on left & right inserts, moving one tab each week ('playing leapfrog').
DeleteThis would make composing quite straightforward; a do2p (2dpp) generator would exclude Monday left and Sunday right views (assuming Monday start to week), and the wo2p generator would include the Monday left view with week left view, and the Sunday right view with week right view, onto a treble page fold. My existing imposition scripts would cope with the resulting single and treble page inserts.
A picture would paint a thousand words, but, of course, we can't post pictures. I might see how much effort it would take to modify my existing do2p and wo2p generator scripts...
that was me...
Deletewo2p script modified to create the 3-page foldout, with wo2p diary view to the right of Sunday, and structure in place to draw wo2p notes view to the left of following Monday, and the daily pages. Now need to decide what the notes pages should look like, and what daily format to use; the only do2p script I have is a very minimalist one for creating the half page split diary view mentioned above, and is rather unconventional, though it will generate a full page view without any changes
Deletedo2p script written, and the 3-page wo2p/do2p script refined. 4-ring PocketA inserts generated and imposed to A4. Just need to print, crop & punch and see how it looks in a binder...
DeleteI have since thought that writing in the foldout pages might prove difficult, 'falling off' the edge on the single-page stack. So that will be something to trial; may not be so bad with the 11mm rings I use.
I'm definitely with you on 'both work until they don't'! The problem is that both don't! The problem is that the diary I'm using seems to stop working for me very regularly :)
ReplyDeleteMostly I'm a weekly planner and I like to see the landscape of my week in one view. But very often I need a more detailed view, and also a daily to-do list, which is where I need a daily view. I'm sometimes trying out a monthly and daily combination but that's not ideal either because I don't get the weekly landscape - and three layouts would be confusing.
I’ve started using the weekly with a notes page layout. I have a pocket which I love the size of. I can add work shifts and appointments on the actual diary part and then add reminders and notes on the opposite side.
ReplyDeleteI had a moleskine diary with this set up years ago and it was always my favourite. Was really happy to replicate it in my Filofax
Oh, and having seen this post on reddit, I created a job application tracking insert... The OP on that thread didn't respond to my offer, but if anyone is interested, let me know...
ReplyDeletehttps://www.reddit.com/r/filofax/comments/1sv6ryj/looking_for_inserts/
At work I used a TMI planner with week to view diary inserts, undated annual inserts for birthdays etc and accounts records, tasks and activities for projects, an address book section and a rough book section for notes. Other inserts were included as required.
ReplyDeleteMy TMI retired with me and I used Cavellini week to view diaries and notebooks instead.
I love ‘The Bridge’ leather bags and when I saw a Bridge A5 and personal organiser on EBay, I bought them both. The leather is a beautiful conker colour and I use the A5 mainly for permanent notes and reference material but I wanted the personal size to take over from the Cavellinis.
The obvious problem was the size of my hundreds of TMI spare inserts. They were too wide to use with standard dividers. For the personal Bridge I made dividers from PVC pocket inserts containing relevant artwork to describe the contents of each section. I only needed a few: diary, to do, home and garden, art and textiles, rough book and personal.
The Cavellini diary often had many empty days or complete pages. I was busy but most tasks were so obvious and regular that I didn’t bother recording them. I bought a large quantity of TMI undated daily inserts and only used them as required for birthdays, appointments, deadlines, flights, exhibitions, etc. They have plenty of room on the reverse for notes and this is working well so far.
Work in progress.
Kathleen
Monthly plus weekly inserts in my ring binder and always a notebook for daily “bullet journal” style scribbles.
ReplyDeleteI guess I fall somewhere in between the two! I've been using 2 days per page since December last year. I see the week view split across four pages. It has been working for me, but I would imagine that it wouldn't work for everyone.
ReplyDeleteI get Monday-Thursday as one view and then Friday - Sunday plus a slot for notes as the second view.
I used to use an A5 week on four pages calendar from WHSmith in work when I had to keep track of my hours. It was the perfect trade-off between slimness of the diary, amount of space per day and maintaining that weekly overview. Maybe I should look into using that for my rings too…
Delete