Video - Lefties: Using A Planner When You Are Left-Handed

Lefties have special challenges when writing in a ring bound planner.  When writing on the right side of the planner, the writing in the English language, which naturally moves from left to right, generally occurs directly next to the rings, making it difficult to write without the rings pressing painfully against the left hand. (For right-handed people, writing on the left side starts far from the rings and writing on the right side pulls away from the rings, so you rarely hear ring-related writing complaints from Righties.)

There are things that a Leftie can do, though, to make things better.

You Tube Video for Lefties

1. Turn the planner slightly so that your left hand can rest on paper instead of rings (as in the picture above).

2. On blank pages, get into the habit of indenting a bit and using the left space as room for notations only. On this project page, for example, I plan to note the dates of each blog post in the left column.

3. Adjust the layout of your weekly/daily pages so that the bulk of your writing is indented. In the example below, the first column is only used for due dates. All the tasks (the bulk of my weekly writing) start in the middle column, so that the rings don't get in the way.

 

4. Put your calendar pages in the middle of the planner so the rings aren't as prominent during most of your planning. Surround the meat of your planner (in my case, my monthly calendars and weekly pages) with pages that require less writing, like Project pages, Notes, and supplies. There is no law that says your calendar HAS to be the first thing in your planner! (Seriously, I'm a lawyer. There is no law.)

5. Choose a layout that puts your weekly calendar to the left as much as possible. I do most of my tasks on Monday through Thursday and treat Friday through Sunday as the weekend, so having Monday through Thursday left of the rings helps me write quite easily.

Happy planning, Lefties! And a special thank you to my Loyal Reader who suggested this important, and oft neglected, topic. Subscribe to email or follow GiftieEtcetera on twitter to hear about new posts.

Etcetera.