I have always loved office supplies, and planners in particular. However, I never found one that I could fully stick with for the full year. A bullet journal came closest, but I struggled to keep up with making the weekly layouts during residency.
Eventually, I decided to design my own. I needed a planner that didn’t put more pressure on me to check things off but also helped me to realistically plan my time.
I would have high expectations for how much I would get done in a day, then feel ashamed when I didn’t even accomplish a fraction of the tasks. I would forget to take scheduled activities (such as a full clinic day) into account – no, I would not be writing an article draft during those rare seconds that I wasn’t in a patient room.
To properly set my expectations for how much could get done in a day, the weekly spread is dominated by hourly timeslots. Saturday and Sunday are full spreads, because many of us have (paid or unpaid) work on those days, just like the traditional Monday-Friday. To be more inclusive of different chronotypes and work schedules, the full 24 hours of timeslots are listed. Hours that are typically spent asleep for a given individual can be repurposed to a notes or daily log section.
One of my proudest features is the Might-Do list. The ability to list something for the vague future without feeling demoralized when it didn’t happen that week was game-changing. The Monthly Parking Lot serves a similar purpose – to remind you that an idea would be nice to get to at some point, just maybe not yet.