Planners - do they work?

This past weekend did not go as I originally envisioned it (I thought I'd get D's Stars closer to the quilting stage). Excuses, excuses I know but I was on call at work last week. Upgrades late Friday night and pages at 4:30 am on Saturday morning I was functioning on less than 4 hours of sleep, after running downstairs and checking it out I was awake for the day. Quite a bit kid chauffeuring to work and back, Chris was working OT. I was  feeling ill all day and barely functional by 6pm. Sunday was running around with oldest daughter M.

One thing I was looking for was a planner. I'm feeling so disorganized and have little bits and pieces of my life scattered everwhere. I'm looking for a way to track my life in one spot. I don't update my blog regularly, I don't upload doodles or notes and don't use it for other parts of my life so it's a disjointed way of tracking and a very limited piece of my life.  I went to Staples and they didn't have what I was looking for in the size I wanted. There were a few bigger planners but they were hourly which was not the format I was looking for and were just shy of $100 - thats a lot of money for something that really isn't what I was looking for. I thought about making one, but that's a lot of work. I bought a cheap small weekly planner to use until I get/find what I'm looking for.

Taking my search online, I found The Happy Planner series (create 365) through Amazon and that got me thinking about Late Night Quilters - Quilters Plannner  I think Stephanie Palmer did a beautiful job on this, seeing that they are sold out (again) I'd say a lot of quilters agree. Each have their pros and cons, but I'm leaning towards the 365. The reason is - it's expandable. The way I envision my planner is almost scrapbook like, I want to capture pictures of projects or ideas, recipes, fitness tracking, etc and be able to insert it into the week. The 365 is also very reasonably priced (24.99). With our currency issues and shipping costs from US that it can be bought in Canada using CA Dollars through Michaels or Amazon is a major plus in its favour. It also has accessories such as extra pages, page protectors, (even a hole punch) so that you can insert any pages or extras easily. I did not see the price of the Quilt planner but I'm looking forward to see how it evolves.

One con I read in the reviews about the Happy Planner is that disc system is a bit flimsy when stuffing it in and out of the reviewers purse. I did take this into consideration and since I work from home and rarely travel it would be a fairly stationary item in my life and shouldn't be a big problem for me.

Current planner is 18 month July 2105-Dec 2016, while looking at their site I started scrolling through the blog saw they are launching their 2016-2017 planners (there are so many different options) Mar 1st.... I swear sometimes the timing of things I think the universe has a blinking Neon sign pointing the direction for me to go (or maybe just having a cosmic laugh at my expense with giving me hope I might actually get my *stuff* together) - I really hope its the former!

One of the Michaels stores in my area has the 2015-2016 planner and they are on sale right now. I will be making my way out this week to check it out.

No pictures this week but hopefully I will have some progress with pictures soon!