I love my planner. I love having everything at my fingertips to write down, cross out, and decorate. My planner has become a smash book of memories and future plans. I love it! Did I mention I love it?
Then it happens. I am sitting at work or in my home office and I need to remember a date. My planner is either all the way across the house, not with me at work, or buried in my bag. It is a pain to dig out, find, or wait until I get home. Plus my hubby can't see my paper planner, and he is so far away most of the time. I hate filling in several planners and electronic planners etc etc etc....
This morning I figured it out. I can create a picture of my planner, decorated as I like and place it on my desktop. I found a wonderful woman's post on pinterest that discussed this very thing, and even provided links to buy these templates. Um......I already bought my planner...I already bought the software.....I don't want to buy another piece of thing for convenience.
Turns out I DIDN"T HAVE TO. My planner printables were free to me from a blog I subscribe to that I just love. Shout out to Raine at Lime Tree Fruits! This girl is a playful style artist, and she makes planners and other digital files. You can purchase these files from her blog or subscribe for a ton of great printables and freebies.
I took my plain old PDF files from her, used snapshot on Adobe to copy a picture of each page I needed, and placed them on a power point slide. Then I used shape makers to put in all my dates and information. It was a piece of cake. Also, I was able to adjust a ton of graphics, from page color to texture, to personalizing my background. I saved the slide as a PNG file and bam! Instant background. I email the files to my husband, and he can also have this on his work computer so he knows what we are up to. Here's what one of the months looks like:
This is July and not quite fully filled in but you get the idea.
This turned out great. Now I just make it my background and organize the icons into the color coded side bars so each person has their own personal selection of shortcuts. You can also use these side bars for stick notes. There are a ton of stick note apps that you just type information into and a sticky note is placed on your desktop for a reminder.
BTW - step by step instructions on how to do this yourself are available.
I found that this could look too busy for some people. I love a pop of color, but there are those that love functional and subdued. The calendar background is entirely customizable and can use anything from a standard calendar template from word to a desk calendar snapshot. You could probably just take a picture of your current planner and use that as a background. For me, I like a pop of color and places for Icon shortcuts that wont crowd the actual calendar. What do you think?
