Planner notes
When bigger projects need more room
At the beginning of the year I started writing down the bigger things I wanted to focus on this year.
Not in a very organised way at first. More like trying to get everything out of my head and onto paper before it kept turning into the same unfinished thoughts over and over again.
Some of it was business related. Some of it was personal. Some things were still very vague at that point.
Afterwards I made myself a project insert for my planner with a progress section and a small timeline because I liked the idea of seeing how far things had already moved along.
I still think it is a nice page. I just barely looked at it again after setting it up. Whenever I opened it, all the projects were suddenly there at once again. Website. Product photos. New inserts. Blog posts. Ideas I still had not fully figured out yet. Then I closed the planner and most of it went back to floating around in my head anyway.
At some point I started writing the bigger themes on sticky notes instead and placed them on A4 sheets in front of me.
Afterwards I broke them into smaller parts and added smaller notes underneath.
That was the first time I properly saw what was actually inside some of those projects.
One note suddenly became ten smaller things. Photos turned into editing, mockups, listing text, resizing, thumbnails and things I still needed to decide before I could even continue. My desk looked slightly chaotic for a while.
There were A4 sheets with sticky notes all over them. Grouped topics, little clusters and notes I kept moving around instead of rewriting them neatly somewhere else.
But I kept coming back to it.
I could take one small part and work on just that without feeling like I had to mentally carry the entire project at the same time. Some things became smaller. Some disappeared completely. Some stayed on the paper for weeks because I was still rearranging them.
The interesting part is that the messier system somehow made larger projects feel less overwhelming to me. It did not look better. But things stopped feeling like one huge unfinished block in my head.
The planner insert mostly showed me progress once something had already moved forward. The sticky notes helped me while things were still unfinished, unclear and sitting somewhere between idea and action.
I still use normal to do lists all the time and I do not think I will ever stop using them. But bigger projects seem to work differently for me.
Apparently I need to physically see the moving parts first before my brain really knows what to do with them.
I still have not fully figured out how I want to bring this back into my planner yet. Right now the sticky note version still takes up way more space than my planner can realistically hold because most of it lives across larger A4 sheets on my desk.
But I keep thinking about ways to combine both.
Maybe the bigger overview still stays outside of the planner while smaller parts move into it.
Maybe I only pull the current pieces I am actively working on into my weekly pages.
Maybe I need some kind of finished page where things end up once they are done so I can actually see movement over time instead of only looking at unfinished tasks.
I do not really have the final system yet. I just noticed that physically moving projects around somehow helped my brain understand them better than looking at one clean overview page ever did.
So now I am curious how other people handle larger projects once things stop fitting neatly onto one page.
Newsletter
If you want to follow more planner notes like this, you can sign up for my newsletter. I will send a little note when a new blog post is up.
