I’ve been using paper planners for years now, and I’m happy to report that the Cloth & Paper inserts that I first purchased in 2020 are not only still gorgeous, but still working for me.
But after 4 years, the planner cover I bought from Amazon was starting to come apart. It was inexpensive plastic. Enter the new planner cover!
It’s from Stil and it’s the Croc A5 30mm 6 ring binder in beige. What drew me to it is 1) it’s vegan leather and while I do have animal-derived products in my life, I try not to buy more than I have to, and 2) it came with 30mm rings. That means I can have all 12 months in my binder at the same time.
My old binder was 20mm and only held seven months’ worth of pages. Which was fine, but sometimes I needed to write something down for November in January and I had to look elsewhere for my November inserts. Or, in November, I’ll need to verify something I did in January and I have to look for where I stored those months.
“The days keep scribbling themselves in tidy lines.” I’ve been writing the same DMB line in my planners since they were notebooks in the 2000s. I also used it as my blog tagline for a long time.
I wanted a ‘dashboard’ insert for me to store notes about home repairs, so I quickly created one in Canva and laminated it1. I’ve been using it to store phone numbers for estimates.
You can read WM’s sentiments about the number of small repairs and not-so-small upgrades we need. We’ll be in this house ten years next month and there is still so much to do!
My only (small) quibble with this new cover is that the pen holder isn’t large enough for my Lamy pen. I can cram it in there but it gets caught on the seam inside which makes it difficult to pull back out.
I don’t travel with my planner though so it’s a very small quibble.
I don’t use my planner for work planning. For the past three or four years I’ve used Trello for work. They rolled out changes to Trello this week and I’m not 100% sure I like them so that may change. (she whines about a service she uses for absolutely free) I could put everything in here but having separate ways to organize my home life and my work life helps with my personal work/life balance.
As you can see, my handwriting doesn’t match the aesthetic of the planner at all. The clear bookmark is from The Outlined Co on Etsy.
I’m not 100% in my paper planner — this is 2025 after all2 — I do copy some of my appointments into my phone for the automatic reminder function. I’ll set a reminder for 24 hours ahead and another one for how ever long I think it will take me to get to where I’m going.
But in this wild, wild world the act of taking time to write both the important and trivial details in a planner helps to ground me. Because it’s not just about staying organized—it’s about creating a little space for clarity and calm. 🙂
- It is a little dream of mine to have a low-effort ‘side hustle’ of printable planner templates but it seems so daunting! ↩︎
- Some people feel that the presence of em dashes (in my case two hyphens) are a ‘tell’ that the writing was done by ChatGPT but I assure you that this was all mediocre-ly written by me. ↩︎
Yep – Lamy pens – its hard to find a good planner that holds those thick gals!