Minimalism : Part 3 (Planning)

This is not technically a post about minimalism. This series of posts just document my journey towards a minimalistic life. I would not consider myself a minimalistic person yet but I am trying to get there slowly.

You can read my other minimalism posts here:

Minimalism : Part 1 (Reduce)

Minimalism : Part 2 (Organization)

The goal of minimization for me is to reduce the amount of time I spend in cleaning my house or in finding lost items at home. As part of that, I realized during the organization phase that I need to organize my time as well. I have not been planning my time which is why I keep wishing there were more than 24 hours in a day.

I bought a Passion Planner finally and after watching multiple videos for ideas, I set it up for this year. I know I am late by 2 months already. I was using bullet journal from last few years but it is difficult to use it. I don’t have time to draw boxes and decorate it so I ended up not tracking much in it. I also had a weekly planner which I hardly used. I had another journal to track my reading. I tracked some other things on Evernote. I also got a desk calendar to track TODO items. I also use my phone calendar to remind me of meetings and urgent tasks. So as you can see, my TODO lists and checklists were scattered all over the place. Because of the confusion of what to track where, I ended up not tracking few things that I wanted to track.

I am hoping that with Passion Planner, I will be able to track everything in one place easily. I downloaded and printed out some designs and added them to my journal.

Here is a video on how I setup my passion planner. This video does not give a tour of the planner itself. For that, you will have to watch other videos. This video will give a glimpse into my planner and will show you how I customized it for my own needs.

My resolutions for this year are –

1. Exercise – I am using daily habit tracker for it.
2. Reading – Books that I want to read and have read this year.
3. Wake up early – I want to cultivate this habit this year.
4. Eat healthy by cooking healthy food at home. Plan meals in advance.
5. Plan my day in such a way that I am spending more time doing activities that I enjoy doing.

I am hoping that this planner will help me in achieving these goals.

Do you use a planner? Give me some tips on how I can use mine.