Amy Beth

September 22, 2015

A Peek at my Planner – Get to Work Book

I don’t know about you, but I’ve spent much of my adult life searching for THE ONE. The one that can help me achieve my dreams. Be a better person. Support me through stressful times and forgive me when I just can’t do it all. The one that I can pour my life into and receive clarity and purpose in return. I’m talking, of course, of the perfect planner.

Peek

As I’ve grown though, I’ve slowly become more accepting of the fact that I can’t expect the planner to fulfill my every need. I have to be willing to do the work to get the most out of the relationship. I need to be willing to commit. To buckle down and work out our issues and see what good can come out on the other side rather than just run off to a newer, prettier planner at the first sign of trouble. As you can see, planners are a very personal issue for me.

So when one of my favorite bloggers and people on the internet that I most admire in terms of her “get it done-ness” launched a new business that sells planners I decided to give it a try. I had been without a long-term planner for a while. I’d just been casually flirting with different lists and notebooks but I could feel it was time for me to settle down. So I bought it. It’s charming and unassuming. It gives me guidance and focus when I need it, but it never pushes. It allows me space to be me. It’s a planner, and I’m going to stop with this extended metaphor now.

The planner is called the Get to Work Book and it is made by Elise at Elisejoy.com. The next edition of the planners for the 2016 calendar year is available for pre-order now, so I thought it would be a good time to give a little peek at how I’ve used mine for the past few months. You can check out the Get to Work Book website for photos and videos that show each of the different page designs in more detail.

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As a reminder that I want to be more creative and crafty in my daily life, I decorated the cover page with some watercolor. It turns out decorating planners is a thing that people really get into, and this planner is the perfect blank canvas for some serious artistic flair. Just take a look at the Get to Work Book instagram or search on pinterest for “planner decorating” and you’ll see what I mean. Like Whoa.

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brainstorming space decorated with washi tape
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project planning page

One of the things I love about this planner is the amount of brainstorming space that is included. I’m a person who thinks and plans best on paper, but other planners I’ve had have never really included a lot of space for this. I always had to find other notebooks or scraps of paper which inevitably got lost or forgotten. This planner allows me to keep all of my ideas and brainstorms right there with the nitty gritty details of the day. It has several sheets of blank graph paper before each monthly spread and more in the back of the book. It also has some handy project planning sheets for those projects that need to be broken down and given a bit more structure.

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weekly spread

I also like how open ended the weekly spreads feel. If you wanted to write out a schedule for the day, you could do that. If you wanted to just make a big to-do list for each day you could do that too. Or you could be like me and combine a few tasks with a shopping list with a note with details about an upcoming event with an inventory of the fridge for meal planning. The grayscale design gives enough structure to help you keep things organized but is subtle enough to ignore if you need the space.

The fact that I have used this planner for three months and haven’t yet thought about switching it up and trying something new is a big deal, as my husband will attest. Maybe it’s the planner. Or maybe it’s just me finally being ready to commit. But I feel like even if I come up with new ways to organize or categorize my life, this planner will be flexible enough to change with me. We’ll see. But I think maybe, just maybe, I’ve found the one.