I am going to write that English paper.
Tomorrow. After I make this sweet-ass planner.
Putting off Procrastination
I am a terrible procrastinator, and I'm sick and tired of it! I thus constantly devise new strategies to manage my time more effectively... Of course, while procrastinating something else I have to do. It's not a matter of attention, concentration, or being distracted. It's about being interested. And that Saturday, I was interested in making a planner. Within a few minutes of this idea popping up in my head, I had already started working on my very own DIY weekly planner. Several dedicated hours of hard work later, I had my first planner since I withdrew from high school. How did I do it? I'm hungry and I have to take a shower. I'll show you later.
Just five more minutes... |
Planning Your Planner
As I began planning my planner, I started thinking of resources I had available to make a higher quality product. If I didn't have too many resources, no matter! I will be quite satisfied with a crappy planner. As it turned out, I had enough to make a quality, durable planner. You may need:
- Laminator
- Laminator sheets
- Printer
- Printer paper
- Guillotine paper trimmer
- Page protectors
- Pen or pencil
- Inch ruler
- Scissors
- Tape
- Glue
- The ability to manipulate physical objects
With my available resources in mind, I designed my planner. What size page? What size margins? How many weeks per page? How many days per page? What day of the week should I start on? Lines or no lines? Where should I put the day of the month? The day of the week? The month? The year? Why not have a cover? Let's have sleeves on the inside of the cover, to slip in the outer pages of the inner booklet, so I can change out the pages when I'm done with the year. That'd be cool. At this point, thought of cool things I could do with my planner design. I didn't yet care about how to make it.
Designate your design |
Next, I measured out half-inch margins to provide some spatial cushioning between the contents and the edge. I'm cooler than certain groups of people. I decided on having the month and year displayed in a band across the top of the page, so I measured another half-inch box down from the top margin. That left me 4x6 inches of space to fill with the days.
I know I wanted a weekly planner, but how should I display each day of the week? I decided on spread of one-week over across the left and right page. But how should I divide 6 inches of vertical space? Into three days, combining Saturday and Sunday on the last day space, right? No! That's racist. Weekends are just as important as weekdays. So they must have equal space -- dividing the 6 inches into four 1.5 inch portions. But what to do with the eight space? Nothing. Who cares? Non-existent days of the week don't have rights. What day to start the week? Sunday, of course. Sunday holds that position. On calendars that segregate the weekends, Mondays are merely imposters. They are unfit to start the week.
Each day space I divided into two functional areas: the left side indicating the day of the month and the day of the week, and the right side for actually writing stuff. The left side will henceforth be known as the "date box" and the right side will be the "note box". All the extra markings on my handwritten draft show that I tried a few different things to get exactly the design I wanted. I tested the design with and without horizontal and vertical lines, for example. I decided on horizontal without the vertical separator.
Now that I've got my design worked out, it's time to digitize it!
Typing your Prototype
Fire up your word processor (I used LibreOffice Writer) and make a digital version of your draft to print out!
Computerize on the computer |
Wait a minute, how did I do that? It's actually very simple and easy to figure out. I inserted a table the size of the page after I oriented the page as landscape and set the margins to a half-inch (recall the folded margins of my draft). You can see faded numbering on the side of my draft. I was counting how many rows and columns my table needs to be. I turns out to be 7x7. Afterwards, I edited each row to set its height to what it's supposed to be:
- 0.5 inch top margin
- 0.5 inch month/year banner
- 1.5 inch day space
- 1.5 inch day space
- 1.5 inch day space
- 1.5 inch day space
- 0.5 inch bottom margin
I encountered a peculiar problem at this point: my table spilled into the next page, ruining everything. If you encounter the same problem, not to worry. Just reduce the height of the first row to 0.49 inches. This fixes the problem without sacrificing anything important, unless you're a perfectionist. If you are, you should give up on this project right now, go to the store, and buy a planner.
Editing the columns:
- 0.5 inch leftmost margin
- 1.0 inch date box
- 3.0 inch note box
- 1.0 inch combined inner right/left margins
- 1.0 inch date box
- 3.0 inch note box
- 0.5 inch rightmost margin
The result should look like this:
Pictured: Table |
Merge the two cells of the banner and split it vertically again.. Repeat for the right side. This gives the month and the year separate spaces, allowing you to left-align the month and right-align the year as I did.
Next, split all the day spaces horizontally into thirds, leaving the eighth one alone. Each sub-row will be half an inch. Then, split all the split note boxes into halves. This will provide six quarter-inch lines of writing space per day.
For each date box, split the top cell vertically into two. The left half-inch box will be for the day of the month; the right one will be for the day of the week.
The result of these operations should look like this:
Pictured: Cells dividing |
Start with the month. Try out different fonts and sizes. I used the font Akzidenz-Grotesk BQ Condensed for all the text, using size 36 for the month, year, and day of the month. You may have to adjust the table's spacing to contents to get larger font sizes to fit in the box. I also added a space before the month and after the year so it didn't overlap with the border. For the day of the week, I used size 18.
I must admit to something here. I lied. Splitting cells wasn't the tricky part. Dissolving the borders is. This was the most frustrating part for me. I had to mess around with the cell/table properties to get what I wanted. I kept the outermost border because it defines the margins to cut off when I print this baby out.
Once again, the print-ready version. Lazy? Download it here. |
Clover Plague |
By now I am bursting with excitement. I am so close to having a planner! All I need to do now is build it.
Building your Build
I didn't have a long enough stapler to staple the middle, so I sacrificed neatness and folded one side to make it shorter.That's what I would have said if I paid attention in school. Luckily, I didn't, so I had a better solution. I just stapled my booklet from the outside to a bulletin board, pulled it out, and manually folded staples to secure it.
My booklet is done and the laminator is prepped; now it's time to finish the cover. I laminated the cover, then folded it along the line I printed on the back. Doing it the other way around may make for an ugly lamination. At this point, I found that one fold wasn't enough -- it flexed back only to a 90 degree angle. I decided to scrap the whole project and cry myself to sleep. But then I remembered I could just make another fold right next to the first one to complete the book fold. I trimmed the excess plastic from the lamination to suit my needs and turned my attention to making the sleeves.
I improvised the sleeves with the edges of a couple page protectors. I made sure they were bigger than the booklet pages, with enough space left over to glue the sides shut. My two sleeves looked really shabby so I used tape to secure it to the planner so it would be easier to reverse if it didn't work out or if I wanted to upgrade it.
Now that every piece was finished, I slid the booklet into the sleeves and I had my very own DIY weekly planner!
Conclusion
This little weekend project was a fun distraction and the result was surprisingly good. Finally I will be able to organize my daily tasks with ease, helping me build effective time management skills. I will be efficient and productive. All the things I want to do, I will be able to do. I'll get them done. I have the means. I have the tools. I am ready. I am motivated. Let's do this.
Note: I procrastinated this article for a week
I never thought an article on how to make a planner could be so fascinating and interesting. I envy your writing style and abilities.
ReplyDeleteThanks. I tend to be an unconventional writer. Instead of writing an instruction manual, I wrote a narrative so I can express the same spontaneous thinking that made me make the planner in the first place.
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