I’ve been making my own printed planners for years now. It started out due to necessity. I have terrible large hand-writing do to an injury sustained in tenth grade. Can you believe that biology class I managed to put a piece of glass tubing the size of a pencil through my hand?… but that is a story for another time.

I’ve had several iterations of planners through the years. Before I started making my own I used Day-Timer but they didn’t have everything I wanted and to get a purse size the writing areas were so small in addition they didn’t have the pages I felt I needed.

So I switched to Erin Condren. Absolutely beautiful planners! Most writing spaces were larger but at a hundred bucks a pop that was more than I really wanted to pay and still I was missing some of the functionality I wanted in a planner.  

I sat down and decided what I wanted my planner to do. I wanted to have dates so year at a glance, month on two pages, and weekly pages. Budgets were a must both yearly and monthly. I wanted the ability to track my workouts and my Flylady cleaning schedule. Goals, Projects, frequently used numbers, as well as yearly maintenance records for the house and vehicles. That is a lot to ask of a planner.

I designed mine to be 9 inches by 7 inches for the inside pagers and a little larger for the covers. I know this may seem large to some but the size still fit in my purse and was large enough for me write comfortably in it. Staples Arc notebook system seemed to work well for me. When I filled my planner I only put in a quarter of year at a time. The other issue with Erin Condren was the weight of carrying an entire year in one book. The Arc System allowed me to to change out what and make adjustments as I went along ( It was a learning process to get it right).

I did like the weekly vertical setup of the Erin Condren planners so when I created the pages for the week in Photoshop I tried to replicate the look. I do create my own covers as well.

Now for the costs. Ink, 30 pound paper (so I could print on both sides with no bleed), heavy duty poster board can get expensive. Especially at the beginning when you make a lot of mistakes there was also the cost of the notebook system and the special punch (for the Arc System). Due the the odd size of that worked for me I needed to invest in a decent paper cutter as well. I still had to get my covers and dashboards laminated that was a further cost.

Once the initial cost was out of the way it really was worth it. After Staples messed up my lamination 3 times I spurged and got my own laminator as well. Why they would charge me for wrinkles in my lamination I’ll never understand. So you may be wondering why after all that would I want to go to a digital system.

The fact of the matter is that I think it might be less work and less money if I can get it work for me. Miss Sally purchased a huge 10 inch tablet last year it’s a bit longer than my planner but it fits in my purse. I’ll update on how this adventure goes.