Perfect all the time

It's been raining here for several days, and it's depressing. The sun is out today, though, after morning rain, and while I'm sure it's crazy humid, as soon as i finish here I'm going to go out for a little while.

The last couple of weeks I've been thinking about planners again. My sister is having cataract surgery, and my parents want to find an assisted living place to move to, so since I don't have to go to a job, I've been taking my sister to her appointments, and then she and I have been visiting assisted living places, then reporting back to my parents on what we find, showing them pictures, etc. I got a little overloaded yesterday, worrying about what I'm going to do with my own situation, but I'm glad to do it, and glad that I'm able to.

I follow a bunch of "planner addicts" on Instragram, who seem to fall into a couple of camps. One group buys the big expensive commercial planners and decorates them with washi tape and stickers, and their notebooks look more like scrapbooks than planners. I understand it, but to me it seems more about making a beautiful page than about planning anything.

The other group that I follow are the bullet journal people. They use a plan or dotted journal and draw their own planner so that it can be exactly what they want or need. I'm kind of drawn to this--there are some beautiful examples out there--but again, I'm sure that while they are functional, most of the buzz seems to be about creating a beautiful page rather than doing any actual planning.

So anyway, the point is, the planner I was using, the Levenger Circa compact daily diary, wasn't working. When the planner is open, the left-hand side is hourly for appointments, and the right-hand side has two columns for tasks, or it can be used for journaling or note taking. But there is no place where you can see more than one day at a time. With all of the appointments that I have going on right now, I needed something different.

I was in Staples one day last week picking up some address labels for a job I'm doing, and wandered through the Moleskine aisle. The 2016 planners were on clearance, so I bought a pocket size soft cover weekly one, and I love it. It's perfect for what I need now. The left-hand side is broken down into the days of the week, and the right-hand side is ruled for note taking. I put in all the appointments on the left side, and the right side is for my notes--this week it's notes about assisted living places--contact person, phone number, location, how much they cost, what they offer, etc. Sometime in the next couple of days I need to make a spreadsheet with all of the information so we're comparing apples to apples.

There's just something about a Moleskine that makes me happy. I love the cream colored paper, for one thing. I just like it so much more than bright white. There's a pocket in back that I'm using to hold business cards until I sit down and put them into my contacts, and an elastic band to keep it together in my purse. And I'm using some of those stickers and washi tapes that I bought when I thought I was going to do the whole hog decorated planner route ...

I always want my planner to be all things to me, to hold everything, and be perfect. But what I'm coming to realize is that there isn't one thing that's perfect all the time. When I was working at my job, the big daily planner was great to record notes, phone calls, etc. Now that I'm working from home, I was finding that the wall calendar next to me was fine to record appointments, and a plain notebook beside me to record time was working fine.

But these last two weeks full of appointments and information needed something else, and this pocket-size planner is working perfectly. It may be something else next month, and that's okay.