Do You Keep Your Work and Personal Planners Separate?
This is a question I have been asking myself for about two years as my business has grown. What’s better - keeping everything together, or do you separate your business and personal planners?
Now, if you’re asking whether or not to keep your business and personal life separate, the answer is usually yes. It’s not the best thing to bring work home with you in the evening. Sometimes it’s inevitable, but in most cases, work stays at work and home stays at home. (i.e. You don’t bring your personal problems with you to your work environment).
If you’re a planner like me, you may have asked yourself this same question. Or, maybe you work outside the home and you have confidential information stored in your work planner, or it may be necessary to keep your work information separate for some reason. If that’s the case, you answer is pretty clear cut. You may either keep your work planner at work all the time, or it may be something that you need to carry around with you.
In my case, I’m an entrepreneur with an online business. I feel like I’ve been struggling over the last two years a bit with the basic distinction between work and home life. Not to mention, my desk and work space is smack-dab in the middle of our living area, so sometimes I’ll be dealing with kids in the middle of a busy work sesh. (Or, the kids will be quiet for a few minutes, and I’ll jump on my computer to get some work done).
I’ve also been struggling recently with thoughts of what to do in my planner. I’ve had it both ways - completely separate planner for both work and personal, and then mixing it all up into one. Personally, because I feel like my work is so integrated into my home life, I like keeping everything as one. However, I recently discovered quite quickly that my planner doesn't hold everything. My Franklin binder just isn’t made to hold all the craziness that is my current life. So, I ended up putting all my work information into a separate Franklin Classic Binder and my personal stuff into a completely separate binder.
The downside to this is I’m finding I always need to reference both binders at once. My biggest issue is that my personal and work stuff just doesn’t fit very well onto one monthly calendar. (Hence the need for separation). So, I’m constantly flipping back and forth to make sure that I don’t schedule a heavy work day on a day when I have an appointment, or the other way around.
The good thing about planning and having your own business is that you can make your own hours and you can schedule your own day instead of following someone else's schedule. If I want to work from 5a-12pm, I can. If I want to work after midnight, I can. Also, very early into my business, I began day theming and batching my content. Day theming is scheduling a very specific task for that day. So, when I go to make doctor’s appointments, I already know ahead of time which will be the best day to schedule it on. Also, batching content (doing all of one thing at once - speeds up your process because you’re eliminating the idea of multi-tasking which slows down your mental processes). So for instance, Monday I treat as a journaling day (sometimes a catch up day if I have a task - heavy week). It also helps me ease into the week. Tuesdays will now be blog writing sessions, and Wednesdays are designated for my sticker shop. Thursdays are mostly for editing. Most of my videos are made in real time (i.e. I film the day before, edit it right after and post for the next day). I try to only have one “real-time” video per day so that the amount of time I spend on filming and editing is kept to a minimum. However, there will be times I have a bunch of content to get out all at once, so I’ll pick a day during the week and I’ll block out a couple of hours to film it all at once.
Of course for me, I need to “book” a babysitter and quiet time so that I can do that. It gets much harder to work from home the more kids you have!
How do you separate your work and personal life/planner? Let me know down in the comments and we’ll see you guys next week!
🧡 SAN
