Planner Paralysis

What's an overthinker to do when there are too many tools?

“Get Seth and his little black book”

People used to joke about my notebook when I worked at the bank. It went with me to meeting (and we had a LOT of meetings) and tracked everything about my working life. Schedules, to-dos, notes, lists, etc.

I never felt like my planner system was perfect, but it was enough to make sure I had a place to log random thoughts and quick to-dos.

Fast forward a few years and I find myself in Planner Limbo where I’m struggling where to go next.

Here’s how it started:

I was a HUGE Michael Hyatt fan when he came out with his Full Focus planners. At the time they were quarterly planners with space to put your daily Big 3 priorities, extra tasks, schedules, and notes. It even had space to do weekly reflections and goal setting.

I loved it, but I quickly felt too boxed in with the existing structure. I needed room to make mistakes and use multiple pages for a single day if needed. That’s when I got into Bullet Journaling.

I’m assuming if the title of this post got your attention that you’ve at least heard of Bullet Journaling. But just in case, Bullet Journaling (BuJo for short) is a system for “rapid logging” your events, tasks, and notes in a way that’s structured enough to give you some guardrails, but open enough to be whatever you need it to be.

I stuck with Bullet Journaling for YEARS until I left my job at the bank and took my CPA practice full time.

One of the things that I didn’t like about Bullet Journaling was that as open-ended as it was, I still felt confined in that I was afraid to scribble. Even before I got into planners, I always needed to have some sort of scratch paper next to me to jot down quick notes and numbers. But with Bullet Journaling, I never wanted to do that because I felt like things had to be organized and tidy.

So when I took Norris CPA full time I got a digital paper-like notebook (then the Kindle Scribe, but I recently upgraded to the ReMarkable).

This was perfect! I got to handwrite my thoughts which I’ve always enjoyed, but I didn’t have to be afraid to make a mistake because the number of “pages” at my disposal was endless!

And that ended up being my latest planning problem. Things that are digital, even when handwritten, don’t feel like really exist. I don’t trust that I’ll ever refer back to them or be able to find them when I need to. It doesn’t feel real enough to bother writing down anything really important.

But paper feels TOO permanent and like I have to have all the right words from the first stroke, otherwise I don’t start.

So what’s the solution? What’s the right balance of digital vs paper? I haven’t even broached the idea of platforms like Notion and Evernote.

Right now my system is a combination of the ReMarkable tablet for daily and weekly notes with Notion and Google Calendar on the back-end as the repository of my main task management.

What does your system look like?