Cheap Planner Refills #2: Setting Up Undated Pages

Yesterday, I posted about Plan Ahead planner refills. Today, I wanted to show you how to use the undated refills to plan your life.

The refills comes with a lot of extras, like a page marker, information pages, tabs, and blank pages.

They also come with a year's worth of planner pages, tabbed by month.

The weekly set-up is a lot like the Flourish inserts that you've seen before on my blog.

The biggest differences between Flourish and Plan Ahead inserts are 1) more color in the Flourish inserts and 2) on the Flourish, the highlight area is ALWAYS to the right, while on the Plan Ahead inserts, the highlight area is gray and always to the inside, near the rings.

I like the Flourish highlight area better, since it is more difficult to write near the rings anyway and I use the highlight area only for "should do" tasks.

There are pages between each month, including a graph page (good for tracking goals and household tasks) and a monthly to do list.

To set up the pages, first fill in the dates.

I like to cover unused monthly squares with washi tape.

I just line the tape up with the box and estimate where to cut it.

TIP: Better to cover a bit of the lines than make the piece of tape too short. It will look visually neater.

Note that I use a bit of washi tape to highlight blocked out days with upcoming travel.

Weekly updates will also need to be updated.

I use only black Frixion pens to fill in dates.

TIP: Don't use black for anything else. That way, the dates look more like part of the planner.

If two months will appear in one week (like September 29th and 30th in the picture below, with October 1st through the end of the first week of October), cross out the unused weekly spread and write all dates on the week with the majority of the dates. (In this case, the first week of October should include the two September dates.)

Staple the unused month right at the very edge to keep you from accidentally using that useless weekly spread.

Or, plan ahead and remove one page in the middle of the weekly spread for the carry-over month.

Tomorrow, I'll let you peek at my processing of my Future pages into the new Plan Ahead inserts.

Etcetera.