Our Planner Evolution 📙

0:00Welcome to the Planner Pals Podcast, a podcast hosted by two true planner pals. I'm Jess or Jessie Curran. And my name is Mark and I go by Mark your pages. Thank you for joining us for another amazing podcast episode. Today is going to be very exciting. We're going to be talking about the evolution of our planning journey and what's so great as always. And so people always tell us Jess they love is when we have two very like conflicting or like opposite sides of a topic.

0:24And today is so true because Jess has been a planner basically her entire life. And I didn't find it until much later on in my life but suffered because of it. So really excited to chat more about how our lives have evolved over time with planning. You know, I very much appreciated the kind of organizational step for this podcast. I'm like, how do you want to spend this? Like, are we just going to kind of monologue for, I don't know, 30 minutes to an hour and a half about our planet journeys? And that's like, I only have three stages. What are you talking about?

0:52I'm like, oh, OK. Well, before we get into our topic, we just have to thank everyone for taking our little personal quiz to see if you are in planner chaos or if you've made it to planner paradise. It was so awesome to not just for people to say, hey, here's why I am on the spectrum, but also here's why I am or here's what's working with my planner or not working with it. And it was just really fantastic. I know I say it every single episode, but I really do meet it.

1:16I just want to really stick it in there that I really do love the conversations that we have. The Planner Pals are truly amazing people. So thank you all for sharing with us. Yeah, and while he really loves it, I love it the normal amount. So like, it's cool we have balance over here. I like talking to people on the Internet and. It was really nice to hear about people who do feel like they get that kind of cyclic nature of planning, you know, going from planner chaos put to back to pace and then back to chaos again, and kind of doing that over and over as you iterate and iterate with your system.

1:44And I think that looking through our planner evolution, that is very much reflected in there too. Yeah, it absolutely is. So let's go ahead and start in the beginning because like I said, I really didn't start doing any major type of planning until I was in my early 20s. I was already working full time. I did dabble a little bit in high school, but it was very silly, kind of how I thought I was going to do it. So just why don't you go ahead and start first? Because I feel like you've been on this planner train a lot longer than I have, and we'll just kind of insert what I feel like.

2:12Oh yeah, I did something like that one time. Well, I think it was very much helped by the fact that the schools that I went to, especially in kind of like upper primary and high school, for the most part, they gave you a pre printed planner like a school issue, one that they had, you know, some kind of artwork of the school on the front that was done by a student. It was like a prestigious award to get your artwork on the front of the school planner.

2:32So having that kind of already supplied to us and then the incentives to use that through kind of like, you know, form group kind of projects and stuff. You know, take your planner home, get it signed by your parents, make sure you're using it, get, you know, school credits or points towards your schoolhouse or whatever. Those kind of things made it so that planning was already ingrained in the system. It's just, you know, there was a lot of kind of, it was a very relaxed nature, we'll put it that way. There was a lot of a relaxed nature towards how it was actually utilized and whether you actually used it for planning.

3:04So honestly, for a lot of it, I used it more as a sketchbook and as a place to just decorate and put in pictures of favorite kind of characters that I liked from, you know, like manga and anime and all of that type of thing. So it essentially just became a record of all of the stuff that I liked at the time, more so memory keeping than it was actually planning. I remember there were also a lot of one page layouts that I had where it's one pen and a whole bunch of scribbles.

3:29There was another one where I decided to attempt a blown art picture I had kind of just, you know, in the middle of a class. It was probably English because Jess wasn't paying attention. Just cut a pen up and blown ink all over the page to make this kind of like branched tree looking piece. I wish I still had them, but I foolishly threw them out. Well, you can remake them, Jess, with the extra ink that I gave you for the fountain pen that you won't change.

3:52You just use some of that ink and do the same thing. I'm sure you've got you do actually you have that reusable the little straw that you brought to go wild. He could just use that I'm. Literally sitting here envisioning me doing the same thing to Iris, my pen, that's her name, doing the same thing to Iris as I did to that pen. You're just like, crack it open and break its leg and just like spit the ankle over the page. Iris shall not make the same fate. But maybe back then gestures wasn't as adverse to getting things messy.

4:16Because nowadays the idea of doing a blown art picture in my office gives me the heebie jeebies. Like what? What potential for mess there is in that? What's so interesting about it because my girls have the school issued planners too, and they don't use them. And now as an adult, I'm looking, I was like, why aren't you using this? Like they're literally giving you everything that you need. You can write it down. When do you have a test coming up? When are things due?

4:38And I'm trying to relay a lot of the things that like I didn't have. I mean, as a person who was like recently diagnosed with ADHD, right? I struggled my entire life, elementary, middle school, high school, even in the parts of college until a professor like helped me understand like how my brain should work or how I can make it work, which honestly is the first time that I actually felt like I, I was doing things the right way and studying the right way. So I didn't like have any of that. So now with the girls, I'm like, you have this, they're giving it to you.

5:03Like you can write down like when homework is due and when tests are coming up and you know, if you have a test coming up, you can write, you know, the day planner and like that you need to study for that day, but they're not interested. But it sounds like you were in the same exact zone, like you had a planner. I think when we're younger, not all of us. I'm sure there are a select few planner pals out there who have been planners their whole entire lives. Like it's just not something that we're very interested in. I don't think we realized yet how helpful it can actually be. And I think that also, it's not until you get to a certain level of kind of complexity that you actually feel like you need it. I felt that for a lot of my early kind of planning days, quote, quote, I could just hold things in my head like it wasn't that hard.

5:44You'd get most frequent updates in class about, you know, when things were due and such. And if you did things in a timely manner, it didn't really matter. You didn't need to have an external system to plan those things out or anything. That was something that needed to be remembered, was routine enough that it didn't need to be written down. It's like, OK, Thursdays, that's netball training. Saturdays, that's the netball game, happens every week. Don't really need to write that down for myself. I did eventually get to a point where I needed to use it as a planner, but that wasn't a skill that was necessarily taught to you.

6:17So unless you were a self starter and you kind of investigated that yourself, it's not something that you know, somebody held your hand and said this is how you actually utilize this note book that's been pre printed for you. Oh, that's a really good point. I guess you never really think about like actually being taught how to plan, like how to use it. So you're right, like most people don't know or aren't interested because you don't know what to do with it.

6:39Exactly. So the systems that I kind of trialled for myself, at least I trialled writing down all the classes that I had in any day on that block that I had for the day. So it's like if on Mondays we've got, you know, English and history and geography and language or like whatever, I would actually just write those classes out in border down that space. Because then I had kind of pre sectioned off a little space for myself that if I got homework for that class, I could jot it down. If I didn't have any homework for that class, I could either cross it off or like check it off or something like that. But then I had this kind of conflicting point of, OK, I've written down when it was assigned, but I don't have anywhere to write down when it's due. So which one is more important to keep track of? Because it's all good and well to be able to write down like these are the classes that I had for any day and give myself that structure.

7:27But it's not necessarily the most helpful information about getting things done in a timely manner for when I actually need to get it back to my class teachers. See, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. The, the only thing that I had, and this was in high school and it's, it's a bit of a silly story now that I think back on it. So when I was in high school, this was before cell phones. This is before you walked around with a laptop. Like I had none of that.

7:47So the only thing that I had essentially was like, it was this flip, like a comedy call, like a digital diary kind of thing. It could control like TV's. So like when we would be in class, I could turn the volume up or turn it down or change the channel on the TV that was in the room. That would always like make my professors very upset like as we were doing it. And you could also do like two way communication. So like before text messaging, like that's if other people had the same one. But what I actually used it for, well, not really actually I tried to use it for was planning because you could put in dates into like this digital calendar thing. And so I tried really hard to put things in there, especially like when things were due or whatever. But the problem is the same thing we always talk about. It's like you can write stuff down on your planner or your phone or whatever, but if you don't go back to look at it, you don't remember that it's there.

8:35And that was always my thing. I wasn't good at just remembering dates. Like even now I still have the same thing. Like I know field hockey happens on Monday and Wednesday in games on Saturday, right? Like I know that I know the times and all of that, but I still write it down like just as like a way to remember things. But back then I needed to do the same thing and I didn't realize it. Like Mark, you needed to write it down somewhere that you were actually going to look at it.

9:00So that was the only thing that I kind of had, you know, And even when I got a cell phone, there was nothing like that on our cell phones. It literally just made calls and T9 texting like and it cost money every single time you did everything on it. So like, it wasn't what it is now. Thank God it changed because I can't imagine it being the same. But there's just so much that I wish that I had or knew how to use that just like wasn't available at the time other than analog planning.

9:28And like we talked about, you're not really interested in that when you're a teenager, you know? It also was very much that kind of power of having other people around you who were using the system because in terms of my use of my school planners, a lot of it was very much influenced by how my friends were using theirs. So they were using it as kind of like a collage E sketchbook type thing for, you know, personal creativity. So that's how I used it. And I think this was really evident in the last two years of high school because that's when I moved to New Zealand, moved to a school that didn't give a school issued one. Actually, I think they did.

9:59And I think it was actually a piece of trash. That's why I didn't use it, but nobody else used it either. The paper quality just wasn't there. It was a lot of ghosting, bleed through. It was absolutely awful even back then. Jess was a prissy dish, so it's like did not want to use that at all. I ended up trying to buy myself one from like a local stationary store, but because nobody else was using it with me, I didn't have that kind of community aspect that came with it, which I don't think that was necessarily a conscious thought at the time, but there was definitely power and the accountability of having other people planning or, you know, decorating in the same way that I was. So in terms of my personal organization for Upper High School, first of all, didn't really feel like I needed it because school itself was, the structure was different here, the structure in New Zealand, very different to what I had experienced in Australia.

10:46And it got to a point where I was like, I just don't need to write this stuff down because it's not that hard to keep up with. Whereas the other areas of life that I had, you know, like starting to get really into movies and games and you know, other types of media and whatnot. I really wanted to keep track of those things and also my goals. And the main system I used for that was Excel, because I'm a bit of an Excel fan and girl. You really are. I think we always talk about it.

11:11I was like, I'll never forget turning on ESPN 2 and there being a championship of Excel, and you're the first person I thought of. I was just like, Jess could be on this. I would love it. But yeah, so I just started organizing those things into what I called my life lists, which is essentially just like, you know, 1 Excel document called life lists with a bunch of different tabs where I would just have lists upon list of different things. Whether those be like, you know, the 101 things that I wanted to do in the year or they could would have been my movies that I had added to my like physical movie collection or TV shows I wanted to watch or anything like that. They all just went into this one document of life lists. Yeah, I was not that person at all. And it wasn't honestly, until I started actually using like bullet journaling and doing that. I just don't think it was something that ever really stuck with me.

11:57I always wanted to. I remember there being a group of friends that I had in high school that were all about their planners. You know, they were always writing stuff down in there. They knew when tests were coming up. They knew when projects were were done, they knew all the holidays, what was going on when the assemblies were like, they wrote all that stuff down. And I just remember being like, that's so cool. I would never do that. But I relied on them because they'd be like, hey, when is that English test?

12:20And they're like, hold on, that's going to happen on Thursday. So we have to make sure that we're doing our study group on Tuesday so we're prepared to stay. And I was like, OK, and This is why you have a four point O and you're top of the class and I'm somewhere float in the middle just kind of making it. I also think that, you know, having those other people who you can kind of rely on to give you the reminders, you know, as a child, like child, child, obviously mum and dad or like your teachers or whatever, they're going to give you a lot of those reminders. When you get to upper levels of education or then into like, you know, professional spaces and whatnot. Then there's a lot more kind of like I have to be self reliant. I have to be able to organize my own information and I need to find a way that's going to actually click with me. Oh, you had parents that actually like cared about what was happening in school because I did not have that. My I was always the one that was like last minute day before. Like, oh, dad, they said in class, like my science fair project is due tomorrow and we

13:16would be up all night like making up something. I mean, he would help me do it and get it there. But it was always the day before. And then now like talking to somebody about ADHD and all these other things, like I realized that my dad and my parents probably have the same kind of thing too. So I got it from and so like that probably wasn't an interest or anything else versus now like with our girls, again, it's not me, it's my wife who has always been very good about remembering and kind of scheduling and doing that.

13:42She knows when those things are happening. She's asking, she's reminding. I'm still just like very still trying to figure myself out. Just like I would love to help you. I can like, do you want to learn how to bullet journal for school? Like that's the only thing I'm interested in. I will help you help yourself. What your mention of the idea of doing the project the night before? I have like a core memory from Year 3, Jess, who had to do a project on the Olympics or something because the Olympics was actually in Australia or whatever.

14:09And I remember it was not my finest work, let's put it that way. My teacher pulled me aside at the end of class, like when people were going to recess or whatever. It was like you know who I picked this assignment for? I'm like in Year 3. So I'm just like, I don't know who she's like, I picked this for you. I thought this would be something you would genuinely interested in. She made me feel like absolute trash as an older person. I'm just like, why? Why would you think that That was the reasoning to go with I hate sport?

14:35It's so strange. I didn't know. I didn't get it. But I do recall that, you know, maybe that kind of like set me off on this. I must be a planner. I can't possibly put forward work like this again. I need to get my stuff done in a more timely manner so Mrs. Anderson in Year 3 doesn't come for me again. She's the one that set you on this path. Really. You have her to thank. You should be thanking her at the end of all of your videos. Shout outs to Miss Anderson for making me like the persnickety biscuit that I am today.

15:00You're the real 1. Thanks for giving me anxiety. So we thought of the high school. Now I'm going to talk through that. I was sharing before. I don't think I really understood about like studying and planning probably until I was in college. I don't know if you have anything else you wanted to share that kind of in your journey between high school until you went to that next level. Anything else happened in there that kind of helped set you on this projectory other than Mrs.

15:23Anderson? Other than Mrs. Anderson, everything revolves around Mrs. Anderson. No, I think that once we got to university, I did actually start to get more kind of into the realm of planning. But in terms of your college experience, how did that go? For me, I, I wasn't until my second year of college, so I went to a Community College first before I went to the four year school. And let me just go ahead and preface this by I was never a school person.

15:49Like I never thought that I was going to go back to school. Like I came out of high school and I went into radio broadcasting and that was my career and that didn't work out. And my wife was actually when he really pushed me to go into that and in graphic design. And I realized like, oh, school's actually fun when you get to do things that you're interested in. But one of the things I took was an abnormal psychology class and I had always kind of struggled with studying as a whole. Again, I was great at the projects, the creative projects got any hands on, but like English, math, you know, any other subject where I had to study down, I didn't really know how to do it.

16:22And again, at that point I did not know that. Like it was something that my brain just couldn't do. Like I would fall asleep all the time When I was reading my textbooks, I'd fall asleep. Now sometimes what I'm reading just because like it's if it's not dopamine kick it in to keep me awake, I'm asleep. And I remember sitting down with my professor one time and I was like, I'm really struggling. I forget what it was something about like synapses or something like that. We were talking through and he was like, can you go through like how you study at home?

16:51Like what is your process? And I was like, sure, I, you know, open up my textbook. I read, did I highlight as I go along for anything that I think is important. And he's like, and how much of that are you retaining? And I was like, oh, I probably read that four or five times. And and honestly, like, not great. He's like, OK, I'm going to give you a bit of advice that I think is going to really help you out. And like, this is what I'm talking about. This literally changed my life from there forward. I don't remember his name, so I can't give a shout out to that professor.

17:21Mr. Anderson. Yeah, Mr. Anderson was the teacher. He had. He said to me, you know, I want you to go through and I want you to read this chapter. And I don't want you to highlight. I don't want you to do anything. I just want you to read. He's like, because what you're doing is that when you're highlighting, you're, you're switching your brain's focus, right? You're no longer retaining what you're reading because you're stopping to then highlight something.

17:43And then you've got to retrigger your brain to remember where you picked up. And you're doing that multiple times. He's like, so go ahead and read this chapter straight through without stopping. He's like, OK, he's like, then I want you to go back and read it a second time time. And I was like, oh, I'm not no, no, I cannot. But he was like, now I want you to go back because you've already read it and you're starting to retain more information. Now I want you to highlight. So as you're going through, because you've read it already, now you're kind of rereading with the intention of highlighting the information.

18:13I'm like, cool, I can do that. He's like, then I want you to take out your notebook and I want you to write down the things that you highlighted. And I was like, gosh, this is a lot of work, but writing it down after doing that process is that's what's worked for me since. And so like the rest of my college career out of four point O going forward, I was remembering things. I was studying, like all of those things that literally changed my life at that moment in time.

18:40And I've always done that now because it's like, yeah, I want to take the shortcut and just read and highlight, do whatever. At the same time, even with like news articles now that I read on my phone, like I have to remember, like, Mark, don't stop to do something else. Like read it then if you want to come back to it later, do that. And that honestly was kind of a really important part to me because then moving forward, everything I did kind of revolved around that structure of doing it. I still wasn't using a planner.

19:06I think by that point, we definitely had the Internet of like aging myself did this podcast today. I'm like, what did I have available to me by that point? We definitely had the Internet, you know, I was building websites, I was doing all this different stuff. So I probably had a digital calendar, you know, at some point, I probably just wasn't utilizing it in the right way, you know, So I was definitely writing things down somewhere. But like that studying point really changed things for me.

19:31And I think from there moving forward, and I think even why now, it's still really important for me to write things down even if it isn't a digital space or somewhere else. I love your I'm aging myself. Did I have the Internet and go? I definitely did. I had the the Internet in high school like I definitely did, but again, it was like AOL dial up with ACD and you only got so many minutes it's. OK, when you were talking previously about the idea of the phone bills and you got charged for every little thing, I'm like, yeah, I had multiple, like multiple 100 phone bills that came through. I was, I was not in the good books. Had to do many many hours at the McDonald's to be able to pay those ones back.

20:12Oh dear, I did have, I did have Internet. Can confirm, did have Internet when I went to college. We we don't call it college here, we call it university, which always trips me up because my high school was called Onslow College. So when people say college, I'm like, Oh yeah, high school, but no, you know, different terms all the time tripping me up. I we need a universal language and it's hopefully one that I actually understand. But we'll get there one day. For university, though, I don't know if it was necessarily a good thing for me, but I found the first trimester, like the first kind of like set block of classes of university easy. And the reason it was easy is because it was pretty much a recap of everything you'd already learned in high school. So this is probably, you know, not like, oh, wow, she's a genius or anything.

20:50But of course past Jess was like, oh, this is easy. I don't even have to try. This is going to be a cakewalk. Oh my Lord, the number of courses at university that I had to take twice because I was being a numpty. I swear, I spent so much money. Well, no future Jess had to spend the money because past Jess was on student loans or whatever. But it's fine. It doesn't matter. It's done now I've paid that off. But I think that having better planning routines that then would probably have been really beneficial for me because I would have been able to better track like how I was going in each of my courses and not get to the day before the exam being like, yeah, I actually can't pass. So I'm just like not going to go to the final exam. Or like actually my parents think I'm supposed to go to the final exam.

21:33So I'm going to like leave the house. But there's not a lot of point of me sitting there for three hours writing literally nothing on a paper because I can't do anything. OK, it wasn't like that bad, but it was kind of that bad. So in terms of my organization though, outside of like studying and such, just like trying to keep track of when things were happening, I was really reliant on Google Calendar. I kind of started to dabble with Google Calendar at the end of upper high school, mainly as a way to see when me and my friends were free.

21:58So we would make calendars that we would share with each other so that then we kind of say like, oh, hey, you've got a social event this day, but you don't have one this day. So like, let's meet up, you know, at another time or whatever. Made that very easy. But then when you're getting into a structure which is quite different to high school, like, you know, in high school, you have these are your blocks and each day and these are where the classes slot into them. And, you know, some of those are free maybe in the last kind of year of high school, but most of them aren't then going to university where it's like, cool, you've got a class from 9:00 to 10:00, but then you don't have another class until 4:00 to 5:00.

22:29So don't know what you're doing with the rest of your day. Just sit around, twiddle your thumbs, I suppose. But then you're also kind of in charge of putting in like, you know, tutorial slots and lab slots and all of those kind of things. It's a little bit more of a kind of complex picture. So having somewhere that I could kind of capture that information was very necessary. And in terms of getting things done, because that's only really taking care of when and where I need to be places, the actual kind of task stuff, I was mainly using Excel for most of that as well. I kind of set up an Excel document with all of my like, you know, the classes and their assignments and the, you know, pieces of graded work and whatever. And I'd have little calculations in there. So it would be OK, it's worth this much percent of your grade. And this is is what it's out of.

23:10So if you get this score, you get an A, but if you get this score you get AB and yadda yadda type thing. Because my nerdy math brain just loved that kind of stuff. Didn't mean I was actually going to do it in a timely manner. Eventually I got better. I passed my courses eventually, but it took me a second to get to that point. Yes, thank you. I tried eventually. Again, I think it's one of those things it's just so funny about that you're like, I'm setting up Excel documents to essentially figure out whether or not I have to do this work or not.

23:38And it's just like, but you could have been doing the work and then not sitting there, but it was so exciting for you to sit down with Excel and do all that Excel magic to try to figure those things out. I think it was that you were smart. I think that's kind of the whole point of it is like when you're bored because you're not being challenged, you're then going to go find something else to kind of figure out what you have to do. I mean, I had plenty of people that I went to school with that were exactly the same way. They were like they did so well that they were like, well, if I get a 0 on my final exam, I still have a high B and I'm not going to drop in my GPA.

24:10So I'm not going to do it. Meanwhile, I'm sweating and like feeling I'm going to throw up in the morning as I'm like prepping for this task to do and you're they're just like, yeah, whatever, we're going to the mall. I'm like, oh, I'll be here crying and gig dry heaving as I take this math test. I'd always find that anytime we had exam season, once exam season was over, I would like allow myself an ice cream date, which is essentially me just going to McDonald's and buying a like, you know, 60 cent cone because it was $0.60 back then. They they raised the price from $0.50 and it was like, wow, who the heck is carrying around a 10 cent piece with their 50 Cent piece?

24:42This is ridiculous. And nowadays it's like, here's $4.00 for your ice ice cream cone. You're like, cool. Wow, what? It's not even really ice cream. It's it's the non dairy something. But I know what you mean. You should have treated yourself a little bit better, Jess. I mean, totally, but she was university Jess. She couldn't afford better. She definitely couldn't afford the extra $0.10 on that cone. Jeez. So that's college for us. So it still seems at this point both of us are somewhat on the same path from a standpoint of like we hadn't really found a system or something.

25:12I mean, you were using Google Calendar, like you said, you had Excel, you were using mostly to like curb the systems, Then I'll have to do work. You weren't really using it for planning, but you were like doing other things with it. So I would say, I guess I'll go for me, like one of the best things I did was actually when I went and got my masters and user experience design, I took a class that was about project management and it was the best class of the entire world.

25:35I loved it so much because that's where I really started to understand more about like breaking things down into smaller pieces. I feel like in high school, some of the professors did it that way. They would be like, you know, your first draft is due this day, your second draft is due this day, your final draft is due this day. But it wasn't ever again. It wasn't broken down into blocks of time though, right? I think you had talked about on a previous episode when you were teaching that you did help the kids to try to understand that.

26:03And I think I wish I had a teacher like you because it would have been a game changer for me in my life. But that class for me was helpful. Again, I'm getting my master's degree. I could have used this in all the previous years of school at this point, but like, that was the first time I was ever like, ah, OK. So you have to actually think about what you're going to do, break it down into smaller pieces and then give yourself due dates for those smaller pieces and understand and think about how much time it's going to take to get that thing done. And that was such a fun class.

26:32I still have the book. I was actually just looking at it yesterday because I was like, I feel like I should refresh myself on this book. It's like one of the good school books that you actually hold on to and use again as a resource. But that was a really big time for me. I still wasn't using anything to to plan with necessarily. Now at this point I was getting my masters while I was already working full time. So I think I was dabbling a little bit with different things.

26:55I know at one point when I started working, I decided for myself that I was going full digital. So I had an iPad that was a work provided iPad and I thought I was the bee's knees with this thing. And I have my little stylus before the Apple Pencil existed, and I was writing all my notes. And I was using Evernote at the time. And I don't know why I chose that app specifically, but I felt like it was the coolest. It was doing the newer things. And I like that you could write in it with your hands. I think I've always enjoyed writing things down, but I never had a method to the madness.

27:27I always had a notebook or something I was sketching things in or writing notes in. And now I'm realizing that was such a waste of time because it would be like, oh, what was that note that we had from that meeting last week? And you're like flipping through your book, trying to like find that because there was no method to what was happening inside of there. And Evernote for me was the same exact thing. It was like you would write things in there. I write notes.

27:49I really wouldn't task myself with anything because I didn't really think about doing that there. For some reason, I just kind of lived out of my inbox from Outlook or whatever, but I remember struggling a lot with that because I couldn't find those notes again. It was almost like I was writing them down what was happening in the meeting and I saved it and it went into this void essentially because I, it was before you could actually like search by handwriting. So like I wasn't typing it, I was handwriting it. So the app itself like couldn't find what I was writing because I chicken scratch lefty handwriting. So a lot of things were just kind of getting lost. And I think at that point is when I started to really start to talk about planning.

28:30Mourn my good friend Monique. I still tell her this all the time, every time I talk to her. I'm like, you are the reason that I ever started bullet journaling because I was having all this trouble and she was like this bullet journal method. I just saw this on a Engage article or some article online. Like you should check it out. Like we've really been talking about this and I'll never forget. I remember reading it and I, I entered because we were in two different buildings and I was like, I will never, ever do this because this is way too involved.

29:00Like I've got symbols and dots and dashes and all these different future logs. Like this is the ridiculous waste of time. Like I will never do that. And I literally put that away for two years until I got into the job that I'm in now. But years ago that I brought it back out. But like, I just always remember I was just like, that is never could I ever do something like that. And I still just kind of struggled through work, you know, until again, I left that job to come to where I am now and eventually came back around to like, oh, this bullet journal thing.

29:33I should give it a try. You know, I like that there was that kind of pause between you discovering it and then actually implementing it. Mine was not like that. Mine was not like that at all because I had found that, you know, once I'd gone through and you're done my undergraduate degree, done my masters and whatnot. Up until then, the majority of my task organization, I figured out there was actually a task panel on Google Calendar, so I could just pop that bad boy open and write down all the things I needed to do. Who is she?

30:04So organized, but was literally just one big running list. Like, yes, you could nest things. And I definitely did that. And I had some, you know, items at the top. That was kind of a weekly schedule. Like, you know, Mondays you do these tasks, Tuesdays you do these tasks. I'm pretty sure most of them were like, hey, this show comes out on that day, so you should probably watch it. But like, at least it was some semblance of order. That is the main system that I used up until like the majority of my first year of teaching. We also were a Microsoft school.

30:31The school that I worked at, all of the students had laptops, they all had Microsoft applications and whatnot. So we had a lot of use on Outlook for emails and such, and thus calendars as well. So eventually my calendar moved over there, which meant I was using Google Calendar just for tasks and not the actual calendar because I had Outlook for calendar. It was, it was certainly a system. There's a reason why I didn't keep with it. But we also had one note that I really started to get into because I loved the organization. I'm like, oh, it's like a notebook, but you don't have, you know, a set number of pages and you can just file things away and whatnot and set up different templates for yourself.

31:07It was like it was quite fun, but Excel 11 true love. I swear I set up everything through that. I had all of my student Macbooks. It was all like auto calculating, you know, logged so much data. I logged so much data in there. I would have, you know, different breakdowns of each of the students pieces of work in the different sections they had and the grades that they got for those. And everything was color-coded. And I was just like, yes, this is the best gorgeous use of my personal Excel creativity.

31:35But towards the end of that year, I was just feeling like a drowned rodent. Like there's so much going on. I'm just like getting dumped on by all of these tasks that need to happen and nothing was falling through the cracks. But we would definitely reaching that kind of tipping point. Especially because in your first year of teaching in New Zealand, you're not on a full load. You're also not on a full load in your second year if they've kept it the same since I did it.

31:59So you're on like, you know, .8 of a load in the first year and then .9 of a load in the second. And then you're like a full, full teacher in the third year. So I'm sitting there at the end of the year thinking, Oh my gosh, how am I going to be able to cope with having like, additional classes next year and then having, you know, a different set of classes and having to prepare their materials and all of this kind of stuff when I can barely keep track of my stuff right now.

32:24And then bullet journaling, just like, randomly showed up on my Tumblr feed because yes, we still use Tumblr back then. Is that dating myself? I don't know but it looked so pretty. We were just talking about this at my icebreaker this week for my team was if you could bring back a technology or a trend from when you were younger, what would it be? And Tumblr. And what was the other photo one things are with an F. Flicker. Flicker. There you go. Like people were like, I would bring those back. Like it was so great when you would just upload your photos. It was just photos and then we were talking about Tumblr as well.

32:56My friend that I work with, she was like, that was my deal. That's where I spent all of my time. We need that back now. I think it's still around, isn't it? It just got like lame. Probably, I mean, there's so many other things that like exist now that it's just, you know, we were talking about one of the things that another person brought up was like Myspace, like I love my Myspace page because you would code it yourself. You had your, I mean, it was definitely talk about like social experiment, like going home and resetting your top eight, you know, like every other week on whoever was most important.

33:29But it was such a great place to like put your music and other stuff like that. So it probably exists in some way. But like, there's so many other things between like Facebook and Instagram and X Twitter, whatever we call it now. Like you can microblog anywhere now essentially if you want. I loved the personalization of Myspace and, you know, thinking that you're like a coder because you managed to go and find one of those Flash layouts and you wanted to take off the watermark.

33:53So you like went into the back code and like deleted the little part that had their logo. I'm like, yeah, get wrecked. I'm not going to give you credit for actually making. This Yeah. You don't deserve anything, Tom. Go to hell. Yeah, like joining and you had like 1 friend and it's just this really like sketchy ass picture. And I remember all of the posts on Tumblr being like how founders the best looking. I don't even remember his name because at least Tom was like everybody's friend.

34:17Well force friend like you had to make other friends to get rid of him and I don't think you could ever get rid of him. I think he just didn't make it into your top 8 eventually. Yeah, eventually he just like, slowly got bumped down the rankings until he was no longer in your top eight. Oh my gosh. Imagine if you never got to the point where Tom wasn't there. It'd be really sad. In New Zealand, they had Bebo. That one was a big one. And I remember I got to a point where I'm like, I don't need another social media thing. Like I've got Myspace, this is fine. And Facebook was, you know, starting to become relevant or whatever.

34:47So I put in my I put in my status update RIPGS because I was just like, I'm closing this account type thing. My manager called me my McDonald's manager being like, are you coming in? Because I wanted to check. I thought you died because you put it on your Bebo that you are RIPGS. You're like first of all, thanks for following me. You're my top 8. I think it's so interesting about, again, how you come across that because when did Bullet Journal like officially start 2017? I know that I discovered it at the end of 2016, but I think that nowadays I I know that it had been around before that, I just didn't know about it.

35:29I just looked it up, 2013 is when it started, which would make sense because I just said like it had just come out. My friend had told me about like the article about it and then it wasn't until a few years later 2017 that I was like, oh I should maybe this sounds like a good idea. I didn't even realize that it, you know, had been invented, created, introduced or whatnot by writer Carroll. I literally just came across pretty pictures of it on Tumblr.

35:53And I'm like, oh, that's nice. I want to do that. And I think that that's the thing because the way that I had used my quote planner had effectively been a sketchbook. Like, that's where I started. That creativity element was really important to me. So seeing these kind of systems where people were, yes, organizing their day and and tasks and the stuff they needed to do, but presented in such a way that looked so nice, that was something that I was like, oh, I want to do that. Yeah, Before I got into the actual planning part, because I was thinking about this when you were talking about some of the like digital ways you were doing it. I definitely remember a phase when the iPhone was just putting out a ton, not iPhone itself, but like the store, a ton of productivity apps.

36:35There was like To Do List and there was a bunch of other ones that have long since died. But I remember also with that, the problem I had was always like switching between them because you'd have the one, it was all cool. And then like somebody would come out with a newer one that like had a different swipe or organization that the other did not have. And so there's always another one that was coming in. And that's how my brain works. Like the shiny new thing is what I want to try and do.

36:59And I think that was the other part that just wasn't working for me Also was like, I was never sticking with one thing long enough to necessarily like generate like a habit of using it and going into it. Like for whatever reason, I wanted it to like feed me the information, but it just wasn't at that point where it was like, no, you still have to open the app, Mark. You still have to check off these things when they're done. Like you still have to add your tasks when you're getting them. And like that just didn't kind of work for me for whatever reason because my work computer couldn't have those apps on it, you know, So I was just using my phone. So it was like, wait, I have to take something from my e-mail and then I have to type it into my phone over here for me to remember it.

37:40And it just like wasn't quite sinking for me. And the only other thing that I did right before the bullet journal and I was really trying to remember, I was actually trying to do like a visual Google search on it. There was some type of a task planner that a friend of mine that I worked with at my company that I'm at now was using. And all I remember about it was kind of like a project track planner. So it was like one page and it was broken down in the quadrants and the top quadrant was the project name. And then like the next quadrant was like due date the and then it was like basically broke down a project in a way that was like, what is it?

38:14When are things do who's working on it with you? And then the bottom ones is where you would put kind of like your tasks. And I remember trying that and it was the first like analog way of me doing it. And I think I made it maybe a week. And I was just like, no, this isn't something about this isn't working. Like there was no place to take notes because it was just more about task planning and I needed to write down notes and like I was having meetings and stuff like that. And like, that was the last planner thing that I did before. I was like, OK, Monique told me about bullet journaling and I did the same thing.

38:47It wasn't on Tumblr, but I who knows where it was just like somewhere probably on Instagram, I guess I came across it and started to see some of these other planners and that I had was like, OK, well, I'm not going to be drawing all these pictures and like doing all of this like highlighter stuff in here. And I remember finding our minimalist bullet journalers or like the black ink and a white notebook. And it was much more minimalistic, still very visually interesting to look at, but it was doing what I needed to kind of do like the people I was following and looking. I was like, OK, like they're doing it. They're making this work for them for their tasks. Like I think that I can maybe do this. And like, that's when I was like, OK, I'm going to give it a go.

39:31And I had a bunch of these little notebooks that I got from like conferences that maybe had like, I don't know, like 50 pages in it. And I was like, OK, I if I can keep this for two weeks and keep up with it, then I'm going to go ahead and buy a notebook. And I laugh every time I say this. Now, Jess, I was sweating over a $20 notebook from Lloystrom. I was like, who would ever pay $20.00 for a paper notebook? And that's was that was why I was like, if I do this for two weeks in this little free one, then I will splurge and buy myself a $20 notebook.

40:09Can you imagine myself then looking at me now with hundreds of notebooks? Oh my gosh, I love you being like, no, I'm going to try this free one and then I'm going to splurge on the the more expensive one, which now just like, yeah, it's not that that expensive considering what we actually purchased nowadays. But I was kind of the opposite. I was like, I'm only going to do this if I have the nice notebook. So I went and purchased it, but I'm pretty sure that I bought it from Amazon US despite living in New Zealand. I don't know, was Amazon, are you a thing yet, JNICEPA? I didn't know about it.

40:44So I had to wait for it to get there. I can't remember when I ordered it. I know it arrived on the 4th of November, but I was just like, sitting there twiddling my thumbs and like, OK, well, I want to be able to, you know, hit the ground running as soon as it gets here. So I'm gonna go do a bunch of research. So it was pretty much just me binge watching boho Berry videos. I think that's how a lot of people though came into planning though, especially with bullet journaling.

41:05Like I don't I'd be interesting to like talk to those people now. I don't even know where they are. They're definitely not still posting on Instagram. But it would be cool to go back and be like, where did you find out about bullet journaling? Because they became these giant, you know, early influencers of that system. I mean, like you said, like we didn't even know Ryder Carroll was the person necessarily, because you had Boho Berry and you had all these other people who we were just creating. Like, you know, for me it was like, you know, it was Nicole from plans that Blossom.

41:33I forget what she was before that, but like, you know, I was seeing all these people that were doing it and I was just like, and then you're just like, OK, OK, let's learn more about this from the source. You're like bullet, You're like, oh, there's a website. Oh, there's a guy that made this. And I remember going through that and like studying the website and and literally I wish I still had. I think I threw it away like that original 1. The photos pop up on my time hop still, because I remember the very first thing that I did, I wrote in there and then I had to white it out because I wrote it was like may already. And so I, when I set up my future log, I wrote May down, but I was supposed to write June down, right? Because you start in the month that you're in versus planning for the future for what it was.

42:18It's probably very confusing, but bottom line is I wrote the wrong thing down in my very first writing inside of my journal. Like should have started with pencil. I saw pencils and re raising and re penciling and re raising. I wanted to get that letter and crispy. I want it to look perfect. And I look back on it now and I'm like, she thought she ate. Well, that was the thing. Like I started straight pen and paper. Like I wasn't even thinking about how things looked necessarily.

42:45Like I was very purist when I started. Not from a standpoint of like shouting out about how pure it needs to be. Like I just said to myself, you need to learn what the hell a signifier is and that a dot means a task and a dash means a note. Because that was something new for me too, because I was so used to bullet lists, but not as a bullet journal method bullet list, you know what I'm saying? So it was just very weird to me to like try to do that. And it took me so long to like finally remember that. But I just remember the biggest thing for me when I look back to my first journal, I did a very good job and I, and I love going through it because you can see where I started to lean into that creative side because I started to play around with like spreads and things like that.

43:28And they weren't working. Like it was strictly, I was like, oh, I saw this person on Instagram doing this. I'm going to try a horizontal leaning weekly spread and then I'm like how the after you write in a diagonal space this doesn't make sense. Like this doesn't work but. Or triangular space and you're just like cool, so I need all my teeny tiny tasks at the top otherwise this is just not going to work. Yeah. So you kind of went through all of that to figure it out.

43:54But I think more than anything, what really hooked me was the fact that I was writing things down and I loved checking them off. I still love checking things off and there was just so much excitement around that and I was able to start to incorporate my love for stationary. This is well before I knew anything about fountain pens or stickers or stamps, any of that. Stuff like this is me just finding the pen that I like to write with the most and using that in my journal. And more than anything was at the end of the week being like, Mark, you did every single thing that you said you were going to get done.

44:33None of your projects are late. You emailed back everyone you said you were going to e-mail. Like you made it to every meeting on time. Like this was all successful. And I think that's really what hooked me. And then starting to incorporate more creativity and like my design background in there was more exciting, but it still was that foundational, getting things done and feeling good about it that really started me on that path. Yeah, I think that that kind of like the satisfaction that comes with, you know, checking things off or actually meeting the deadlines and all of that kind of thing, it really incentivizes you to keep going. And that was definitely something I found for myself as well.

45:08But also being able to express myself creatively because I didn't have a creative outlet at the time that I was really leaning into outside of getting to play around in Excel and doing my formula and my color coding and all of that kind of thing. But that was very much like my work creativity, you know, like creating the like units of study and that kind of thing, like lessons and whatnot. But I didn't have a creative outlet for my personal life or like what I, you know, the personal creativity side of things. So that's very much what my journal became for me. Sure, a lot of that creativity was like mimicry, like you're copying, copying quote, quote stuff that I would say online. You're making it my own, making it work with the system or at least attempting to make it work with my personal systems and whatnot.

45:49But you look at it, you're just like, oh, look at Hoberry from New Zealand. Those feathers are looking so boho chic. You did such a great job on those. Or even like the lettering style with the kind of, you know, photography with the little lines through it and everything. I was just like, yeah, we can see where this inspo came from. Also the, you know, rotating your journal so that you could use it as a habit tracker and write the numbers, you know, along the top instead of down the side because you've rotated your journal.

46:16I'm so glad we stopped doing that. I'm so glad I started experimenting with other things because gosh, that was it was a time. It was not my favorite. And you started your Instagram the same time that you started your bullet journal, right? I technically already had an Instagram because I had, you know, Jessie Curran as a name had been like my kind of gamer tag or whatever for since I was 15 or whatever. So I already had an account, but it had been more of like a personal account, mainly sharing overly edited pictures of food that I was eating. And by edited, I mean like, you know, should I go with XX Pro Valencia?

46:50I want to look tanned. There was no pictures of me. It was just food, but I wanted the food to look to hand. I don't know. So it didn't really have a lot of creativity in there. But I do still have the post of me being super excited that my Lt. 1917 had finally arrived, you know, all the way from Amazon US. And I'm like, oh, I got this in the mail today. Like start of something exciting. I'm like, haha. Little did she know how exciting it could be. Yeah.

47:17Then I could literally turn into her career from there. I mean, it is incredible to look back. I also think about my mentality at this time of it because I kind of had a split kind of approach with this. You know, I was like, OK, so I'm in a design space, but I wasn't. I was more of a manager and like actually doing a lot of what my job is now years ago without even knowing because they didn't have a name at the time. And I was just like, well, I don't get to be like creative, right?

47:44Because in user experience design, it's usually a lot more like wireframing thinking like the strategy behind. And I'd come from like a graphic design background. So I was used to being the, the color putting things together guy. And suddenly I wasn't. And I was like, OK, cool. Like I can still incorporate grids and all of this. But the other thing I was like, I'm going to build a brand out of this because for me as a guy, I wasn't seeing a lot of guys early on in the journal space.

48:10And so I was like, okay, this is exciting. Like I'm going to start to post about what I'm doing because I wasn't really seeing anybody. And I was like, and you know what, I'm going to be I'm going to stand out because there aren't other guys doing this. And I actually have in my first general, like one of the pages, a few pages was trying to figure out what my Instagram name was going to be because I was like, it has to be branded. It has to be whatever.

48:36And I have all these like great ones, right? And I landed on men who bullet at that time because I thought it was like, oh, you're a guy. You bullet journal. OK. And I also decided that I was going to be an instant influencer, right? Like, I was just going to skyrocket. I was going to have so many followers. Like, why wouldn't people follow me? Like, I'm doing what other people are doing. That was not it at all. It's taking me a really, really, really long time to get to where I am now.

49:04But I was seeing other people, though, that were just starting accounts. There was another guy named Mark that started his bullet journal account around the same time I did. And for a very long time he was just growing, growing, growing. And I was like, what is he doing differently that I'm not doing? And then, and I'm not ashamed to say this, I started trying to copy like his style of what he was doing because I was like, well, I mean, he's not doing anything like majorly different than what I'm doing.

49:31Like, why is it this working for me? Like what was it about it? And again, it was just, I was still using it for work and like it was still helping me there. But then I started to take on like a totally different like experience or like relationship with bullet journaling because then I wanted it to grow into something more on social media. It wasn't no longer just for me at work, because now I was sharing it so much more. While you were talking I was very much paying attention and not scrolling all the way back on my Instagram to find my first post.

50:03Well, it's funny because I jotted down a note to actually do that for myself on yours because I want to know what your account looked like before bullet journaling because I've only known you as a bullet journaler. I probably did go through and delete ones that weren't really all of that relevant. Look at your Pokémon droids. Yeah, so I, you know, drew a little Pokémon, but you can see that filter right with the orange. Oh my gosh, what was she doing? Look.

50:28At Bulbasaur, this leg kicked out a little bit. That sassy little Bulbasaur. I know it was literally just being like, hey, hey girl, hi, so cute, we love it. So I had like a couple little arty bits and whatever. That was from like 2013 though, so I probably only kept them on there because they were somewhat relevant to creativity and the like and whatnot. But it wasn't until I got my, you know, my first Lt. 1917, and the only thing I wrote was, Oh yes, like there's my journal looking so cute.

50:57We love it. I probably have a very, very similar I will never be able to scroll that far down. I would never make it in our lifetime because I post so much stuff. Well, you see, yeah, that's the thing. If you don't post, then it's not that hard. We also have to be very consistent. Oh my gosh, it's so funny. I was thinking back to it over the summer actually, because I remember it was over Covic, so in 2020, and I remember we were like everyone, we're going to do a 30 day challenge.

51:25Everyone is going to post once a day for 30 days. And I remember all of us being like, hell no, like I could never post that much. And now it's like I'm posting sometimes two or three times a day, like depending on like what's going on. It's just absolutely wild to think back to like how that's gone. I'm like, how's that's grown over time. But what I will say about it though, is that like I can always hold on to the fact that I've always use my bullet journal for work. Now, I have definitely done some very performative, like visually appealing things for the gram and maybe I didn't use them for my life like I tried to, but it just never quite worked out for me.

52:07But it probably wasn't until probably the past two years I'll say where I finally was. Like, Mark, just show people how you are using your journal. Like you don't have to create a collection page of all the movies for the next two years that are coming out like that. I, I remember that because I remember working on that for hours, hours, hours, Jess hours just to share one picture of it on Instagram because everybody else was doing stuff like that. I did not use that.

52:34Like that was a waste of my time. I found that I didn't necessarily start journaling performatively because for me it was just, it was exciting and I was having a lot of fun with it. I think that inevitably I did start to kind of like level up my Instagram skills, you know, taking better pictures, maybe kind of like editing it. So then the color was like better representative of what it actually looked like as opposed to, you know, an in shadow mess with like, you know, the cream pages in particular, they would get so yellow, which you'd think she would have liked given the choices and filters she used to use.

53:10But I was just going to say, you love that burnt, radiant color. I mean, that was all you. Oh my gosh, yes. You can definitely see the evolution of general style if you kind of scroll back through, which is kind of funny 'cause I feel like throughout a lot of my bullet journaling, I had just very much felt that I didn't have a style, probably in part because I was not essentially just like copying other people. But it was very much seeing inspiration online, making my own versions of it and all of that kind of thing.

53:37So I would look at all of these, you know, individual spreads and be like, there's no kind of through line here. Nothing feels cohesive. It didn't bother me so much early on. It did get to a point where it did bother me more and that's when, you know, you get more into the social media aspect of it and you're creating content out of what you're putting into your journal. But I found that at least when I first started because I was so excited about it and I was like, this is so much fun, you know, different way to express my creativity and actually just record things and whatnot. And getting back to pen on paper, that was very exciting too, because I love my computers. I love my apps.

54:13I love being able to type things because I can type way faster than I can write. I don't actually enjoy writing, which is kind of funny given how much I write nowadays. But anyway, so I was thinking like, cool, well, this is for my personal organization, but what else can I do? So I had like a small explosion in terms of how many journals I was using. We had, you know, the bullet journal, which was at that time called a bullet journal. I wasn't calling it my everyday journal yet because I didn't need to. But that one very quickly turned into me getting a travel journal and a language learning journal.

54:45And then I wanted to have a long term collections journal because I wanted to have somewhere to keep those things that I didn't necessarily need them all the time, but I was going to need them over a longer period of time, like Swatch pages or reference pages, those kind of things. And I didn't want to have to remember which notebook I'd put them in because I was going through, you know, at least one notebook every six months. So it's like, OK, in three years time and I need to find my swatches.

55:09I don't want to go back through all the past six different notebooks I've had to try and find that one Swatch page. I'll just put it in its own notebook and then it's another excuse to have another notebook. Yay. I was still too cheap. I like everything about that. I mean, I remember going from that first one to that second one and it was I, I got the Lloystrom first and then the second one I got was the bullet journal notebook. Then I was like, Oh, I found a notebook that's super cheap.

55:33So it's exceed. It's the Walmart brand. It is the worst notebook ever. I used it all the way through. Like I, I stuck with it because I was like, Oh, I'm always trying to find the least expensive way to do this because at that point too, like I didn't know anything about paper. I didn't really know a lot of felt like different types of pens. I think eventually I kind of made it to a point where I was like, OK, I found a pen that I like and that was the Uniball Signo DX right .38.

56:01That's my, that's my fave. It's different now, but like that was my fave. I was only using that and it was just like one of those things or, you know, Micron pens, like everyone had an effing Micron pen for a long time. Like early on, like that's what we all put next to our journals this show that we use that pen like when we did it. And it was like, I was excited about that though, because it was still like, OK, cool. Like I've always loved stationary. I don't know if I've ever told you all this before or not, but from a young kid and all the way through, my dream was to work in an office so that I could have stationary in my office. Like I wanted the the stapler with the tape dispenser and the notebook in the papers.

56:41Talk about manifestation. Look at me now. But it was just one of those things where like I really loved pens and stationary and art and stuff like that growing up. And so it was exciting for me to start to explore a bit more with that and be like, oh, people are using stamps inside their bullet journal. OK. Like, I mean, this was I had crappy stamps back in that it was nowhere as refined as what I am now, but just an experimentation. And we talked about this last episode, right? This idea of that planner chaos, like, but it was all about experimentation.

57:12You know, it was about understanding, like, like you said, like trying to find out like, who am I as a planner? What's working, what's not working? Copying other people's, making it my own, like the the early bullet journals for me, that's exactly what every single one of those is. I mean, like it's super exciting, but I still same with you. Like I didn't feel like I had a style until like again, I feel like when I finally just like let down the fake expectations of what I thought my bullet journal or I needed to show or do. And I finally just said, like, you're getting what I'm giving you.

57:46Like I'm not working any harder for this. Like I'm just showing you exactly what I'm doing. Unless it was like a video or a topic where I was showcasing how to do something. But otherwise, like that was it. And I finally felt like all that pressure was gone and I was like, you're going to like me if you like me, and if you don't, you don't. And I think it though was at that moment too, that it kind of just changed my relationship with like Instagram and my bullet journal and kind of all those things, YouTube as well to finally be like, I'm just going to share what I've got and if you like it, great.

58:14And if not, like whatever, I'm not going to sweat over the numbers anymore. What I quite like about your piece just then is kind of very like highlights the difference between you being like, oh, you know, don't want to spend too much on this notebook. I'm going to get this cheaper one and see if I can make that work, You know, Oh, I'm like, I'm not sure about those pens, but I'll like get this one. Whereas I was like, cool, second week of bullet journaling, Oh, mild liners. People are using those.

58:36I'm going to buy the entire collection. Got them, barely use them. So then a week later I'm like, people are using Tombos. I should probably get the entire collection of Tombos just to be safe, which again, I had to purchase from the US. So I had to pay US pricing with the currency conversion and then the shipping to the ass end of the world where I live. Because Jess doesn't do things in half measures. She either does go to her university classes and crushes them, or she doesn't go and she flunks out. That's how it works.

59:03But I did find that because of that mindset that I have with things, that's probably in part why my journaling lineup kind of exploded. But eventually I got to a point where I was enjoying that creative aspect of it so much and I was enjoying, you know, trialing these different layouts and all of these types of things. I felt very compelled to share that with other people. And that's probably when my Instagram, I started to get like a little bit more serious about it and be like, OK, we'll actually take the weekly snapshot of what we've got going on there and make custom collection pages and showcase that and whatnot. But Instagram I feel like could only go so far. I wanted to be able to explain the things as well. I feel like that's probably my teacher brain coming out. I'm like, no, it is not enough to just have a picture and be like, hey guys, here's an inspiration piece for you. I wanted to be able to like show them the process and talk them through it and all of those kind of things. So then I was like, yeah, we're going to need, first of all, a new journal because we now need a research and development journal.

59:55So it was a great excuse to use another one. And also, we're going to have to start a YouTube channel. Yeah, YouTube for me was only after like I did, I was like I have nothing to say on the Internet that way. Like it was very scary. I think my very first video because you can look at it is a flip through no voice and I put post it notes in as my. Comments as I went through my notebook because I was like terrified. I come from a radio broadcasting background.

1:00:20I talked on the radio for five years. Like why was I so terrified of doing this on YouTube? Like I just think because I didn't realize that planner people were on YouTube necessarily. Like I didn't really know a lot about that when I started it. So it was like, OK, well, kind of see what happens there. Yeah, I spent ages watching, you know, like Boho Berry and Christine Mainlin, I think her name was, or like my Life in a bullet and all of that. But they all had a very kind of peaceful, Zen soft type approach to things.

1:00:49And I was like, oh, that doesn't feel like me. So I didn't really see myself represented like that. And then I came across Cindy got Tribaldo and I'm like, ah, that's my person. Like the planner who swears. That was literally the way that my partner would talk about it. Cindy was effectively the person who showed me that I could do planner content on YouTube. Like I felt that through seeing hers and the way that she approached it and the way that she really just showed up as her very authentic self, or at least what felt very authentic. I'm like, I could do this too.

1:01:17And it wasn't meant that I was going to come out of the bat like, you know, popping my mouth off and all of that kind of thing. And I definitely didn't Watching back on Jess's first channel video, she, she's like little mouse. She's so scared. She, she literally went and bought a DSLR camera because she thought that's what she needed. Couldn't figure out how to use it. Ended up using her phone instead. Didn't have any kind of tripod mount for it. She had a tripod.

1:01:42She had nothing to mount it to, though, so she tied the phone to the tripod with string and I'm like, so, so, so. Ingenuities. That's not a word that I meant to use here, but you get the idea. She was ingenuitous. Ingenuitous. I'm going with. It make it happen yeah, I think I just laid my phone over top of my desk light so everything was blown out. I was just recording into like the you know the mic part of the phone. It was horrible, but no yours. I mean, when I started to find out about you and like your stuff, I mean, in my mind you are already a super mega star. Like by that point, like you had the followers, you had the YouTube, like you were starting to build the community and do you know more stuff around that?

1:02:21So I was like, I, you know, for a very long time, I was still very much starstruck, no offense. I'm not starstruck anymore. I appreciate you at a completely different way now of like as a creator, but it was one of those things where it was cool to see more of that. And I agree with you, like the YouTube stuff, when I started to like look at it more, I wasn't lighting a candle, making a tea, like setting the stage, putting my bouquet of flowers down before I opened up my notebook, you know, with pretty music.

1:02:50I mean, it's me with my fingernails bitten up, bad lighting, drawing 1000 lines because I'm like, oh, I'm going to show you how I set up my week for work. Even though you're probably not interested in this, you know, like, but I think that's just, again, it's just part of learning and like and covering kind of like who you are. It's OK Mark, I watch all your videos, so even if nobody else does, you're just making them for me. I mean at this point I don't care, I just have fun doing.

1:03:13It I do think though, that content creation definitely did have an impact on my planning, even if only to the extent of maybe getting FOMO about different types of planners that I could be exploring. And I definitely hit in 2020 or I guess a little before 2020 because had to wait for shipping because I decided, you know what, I'm not going to use a bullet journal this year. I'm going to use an Erin Condren teacher planner, mainly because one FOMO 2, I wanted to have that kind of like work life separation that I just was not getting with bullet journaling because my bullet journal was like my one and done. Yeah, I say my one and done along with the fleet of other notebooks I had.

1:03:50It was my one and done. So that was where I was organizing, you know, personal and home and work and goals and all of that just in one spot. But I was finding that my work life balance was shite, especially because I effectively decided to tack on an entire another full time job right on top of teaching with the YouTube stuff. So I'd get home from teaching and then go straight into content creation and then go to bed and vocal's like what about me? And I'm like, don't talk to me, I'm busy it. Was not a great time.

1:04:18I'm editing my video on my phone right now. Yeah, it's just like, could you be present in this moment? I'm like, no, like and subscribe. It wasn't that bad, but it was kind of that bad. So I found that because I didn't have that good separation between, you know, the amount of time I was spending doing work versus work versus home, I was like, OK, what can we do to solve this? One of the ways that I thought was getting myself a separate space to organize all that teaching stuff and leaving that planner at school so that then the teaching wouldn't come home with me.

1:04:49Best intentions, ha, ha, ha, ha, because teaching still came home with me, but then I didn't have my planner there to organize it. So it didn't end up working out the way that I had hoped. Also, the fact that it was just a beast of a planner. It was massive, and my desk at work wasn't necessarily small, but trying to get that thing out to be able to use it and then also have my keyboard and my laptop there and all of that, it was just not a feasible system to stick with.

1:05:14So I ended up turning into like this kind of very big plan of slumpy mess because that wasn't working because I'd pulled all of my teaching stuff out of my bullet journal. The only thing that was left in my bullet journal was chores. So that wasn't inspiring. And of course it was 2020, so we all know how that went down. Yeah, I ended up going back to an Lt. 1917 at the end of that year. That's how big of a slump I was in. Wow, yeah, I think for me it was I only had the one notebook.

1:05:42I've only ever switched out to 2/20/23. I tried it 2024, I kind of tried it. One of the funniest things that ever happened to me at work. So this was before 2020. I brought my notebook with me everywhere, like I always had it with me because I also thought that if I was going to do this analog planning, that I had to be that person that only wrote things in my bullet journal. So like my life was in there, you know, I don't think I ever took it one time. I think I took it around with me on the weekends and my wife was like, what are you doing?

1:06:08I was like, well, what if I have to write something down in my bullet journal? And she was like, stop. Like you don't need to do that. Like, you know, and I don't think it was probably the last time I ever took it with me anywhere. But I remember at work one time I had left it in a meeting room and I got back to my desk, was doing whatever and I was freaking out and I was like, I lost my bullet journal. And I'm like going around work and I'm like, have you guys seen my bullet journal?

1:06:32Have you seen my bullet journal? And again, this was early on, I was talking to everybody about my bullet journal because I was so excited about my bullet journal. And, and everyone's like, no, no, like we don't have it. And I'm sweating at work and I go to lunch, you know, and I'm like, where did it go? Like it has all my stuff in it has all my, it has everything in it. And I come back to my desk and there's a photocopy of the front of my notebook and it says, we have taken your bullet journal ran. You only get it back if you stop telling us about your bullet journal.

1:07:03And it was one of my Co workers who found it and just knew that it was stressing me out. And it was just one of those things that I mean, I still talked about my bullet journal because I still love it because people were looking at it. They're like, oh, what are you doing? You're writing things down. Like I haven't seen anyone write things in a notebook like that in a long time. But it was just one of those things like I was just excited to talk about it and you know, because I was getting so much value out of it. I think that's like the biggest thing. It's like I was getting value, therefore I thought everybody was going to get value out of it and everybody needed a bullet journal.

1:07:33Like I said, I'm trying to push it on my kids still because I think a bullet journal is the right decision for them. But it was just one of those things that has just been like, that's kind of been it. Now I have a different relationship though. Also, I think the big thing for me too is like not going into the office as much and becoming a fully remote person. That has also changed the way that I plan. You know, I still have my bullet journal here. It's on my desk all the time.

1:07:55Like at work where is like at work. It was always with me. I was in my backpack, I was going room to room. Like I was just using it a little bit differently than I do now. But I think also I've just come to terms with like here's what I'm getting out of my planner. It's like here's kind of where I am now with it is that I've found ways to be productive in my journal, utilize it to retain information and remember things. Now there's definitely been ebbs and flows of that where I've used it more than less and you know, sometimes not as efficiently as I could be using it, where I've kind of fallen away a little bit from like the really productive parts of it.

1:08:31But now I just enjoy using other stationary inside of it, you know, getting new stamps. I still very much about like functional layouts and it working for work. It's evolved a lot of like how I used it. Like I said, when I look back at my old ones, I was barely using 1A5 page for an entire week of work. I don't know how that happened because now like I have AB 5 and I use two or three pages a week depending like on how many notes I have. And that doesn't count the collection pages I have and write into.

1:09:01Like I don't know who that person was and if they were even worked honestly. Like how did I not have that much responsibility as I do now? But I just think it's been able to flow with me and that's what I've gotten out of it too. I love the fact that my bullet journal flexes with my life versus being stuck inside of like a pre made planner that I have to fit my life into. So it's like definitely started, you know, early on really as a productivity method and like learning how to use it. And it's still that for me now, but like there's so much more that like is a part of that that is like opened up these opportunities for me to go to conferences, right, and talk about it and, you know, work with different brands, like little low mark, you know, starting men who bullet with, you know, 200 followers.

1:09:44That's what I wanted back then. I didn't know anything about it. And like now I get to work with Zebra, right? And I get to work with all these other companies and do this stuff and it's so much fun. And it's so crazy to me to think like all, all of that started because I needed a way to kind of organize my life. And again, it just works so well for me that I just had to talk to more people about it and share like what I've gotten out of it. Because I think at the end of the day, similar to what you were saying, like you wanted to talk about what you were doing and why you were doing that and explain that I'm very similar in that way. I've found a solution to a problem and I want others to be able to maybe use that to help make themselves better. And I'm, you know, I'm, I'm pleased. It's not planner peace.

1:10:26It's still chaos over here. But like, I feel good about what I'm doing. Whereas I feel like I've kind of gotten to a version of Planner Peace because going through making all of the content for the channel and such and sharing all the journal ideas or whatever because I do, I love thinking about new journal ideas in different ways that we can use them and you know, organize different facets of life and whatnot. If it's a year, books or media or relationships or work or household stuff or like whatever, I like to be able to think of things that we could put into our journals to organize those pockets of life and share those things. But I kind of got to a point where I'm like, I want to share other things now I want to talk about other stuff. I don't, I'm done with this.

1:11:07And it's not to say that I like ran out of ideas or anything. It's more so just I don't want to use my creativity for that anymore, which is why, you know, over the past year or whatnot, the number of specifically like journal idea compilation videos on the channel has decreased. I think it's also why my experimentation in my journal has also lessened a bit as well because I just want to use that creativity in different ways. And I've also found layouts that work really well for me.

1:11:33Like I love my weekly dashboard. I like that it's simplified. It just has the priorities, the meals, the task list, and then, you know, spot to write down the stuff that I want to get done or whatever. I think it's not, it's not very difficult to set up. It's quite simple. It's the same every single time I set it up, which probably means that it's not so fun for viewing like, oh cool, she's setting up the same thing in a different color. You betcha. Because it works for me.

1:11:56But because of that, I've kind of been thinking like, well, if I'm kind of organizing my general life tasks and whatnot in that same way all the time at the moment, how am I going to organize other stuff as it comes up? And for me, that's mainly been Notion, like other areas of life that I want to organize. I've mainly been putting in there because if Excel was my first love digital system, Notion is like Excel on steroids in a lot of ways. I still have value for both of them.

1:12:23They are both very special to me and they have places in my system. I still do like all my financial tracking through Excel. I'm not going to go and set up a Notion spread for that. That'd be way too much of an effort. But I do find that nowadays, anything that I'm trying to bring into my life and trying to organize that information or whatnot, my first thought is not usually, oh, new journal, it's oh, new Notion page or new Notion database or something like that.

1:12:47So that's mainly where I've started to do a lot of my planning. So I've got obviously like content calendar over there, there where I can organize when are things coming out for the podcast or for Jessie Korean or Instagram or the newsletter or the book club or like any of those different spaces. Being able to have all of that information collated, but then also filterable so I don't have to say it all at once because it is a lot all at once. That's been really helpful. But then also thinking about personal knowledge management and those things that it would have previously been in a long term collections journal or a yearly collections journal that I want to be able to check in with over longer periods of time rather than setting that up in a physical like analog space. My first thought now is, cool, I will put that in my notion. So I've been slowly developing that, flexing my creativity in that space instead.

1:13:34And that's been fun and exciting. I am also the type of person who likes to chase the fun and exciting things and get the little dopamine kick of setting up a new system and feeling very good about that. And like this is the one that changes everything. And I guess in a way, the bullet journal kind of did change everything. And now it's gotten to a point where it doesn't need to change for now. They will probably get to a point where I do need to kind of tweak it and all that kind of stuff.

1:13:57But I do love it because it can do that. I'm not married to this very structured system of like, these are your boxes and you get this many and it starts on a Sunday. Sunday starts the Hibbie jibbies. I could not, I think, OK, worse than a Sunday start is when the calendar starts on one day of the week and the weeklies start on another day of the week. How are people using planners that do that and not getting like befuddled, bewildered, so confused? It's not a great thing.

1:14:25I think one of we talked about having journals that did that. It's it's your brain just doesn't work that way. I mean, I try to do Monday starts for a while and then I had to go back to a Sunday for a calendar. But my weeklies I only set up because it's for work Monday through Friday. So like it's a little bit of what's actually what you're talking about, but that's because like I have to see a calendar with a Sunday start, but my weekly starts on a Monday with the weekend at the end.

1:14:49But that's because I just don't use that part of it. I love what you said though about like the evolution of your journaling too, because, well, not really journaling planning. I think it's really kind of what we were talking about too, right? It's like how to plan And like what we're doing now, our bullet journals are part of that planning. But I think what you were saying there, which I think makes, I want to say like a lot of sense is the idea that probably early on, I think all of us did our content planning in our bullet journal because we all thought that everything had to live inside of your bullet journal, right? All those collection pages, the graphs, the charts that all those things, right?

1:15:23But then you do get to a point where you start to be like, this isn't the most efficient and effective way that I could be doing this. And I know for me, I've had a lot of guilt around that sometimes where I'm like, no, I'm going to set up an expense tracker and I'm going to do all of this in my bullet journal. But then I just go to air tables. Like Airtable to me is the notion for you, right? But that's because I, you know, I can do it faster. I know that I can automate it, I can filter it. I can look at information how I want to or may want to look at it.

1:15:51I can't do that when it's written inside of a notebook unless I'm like taping over or redoing the spread and rewriting it several times. Like that's not a good use of my time. And I think that's a really big part of our evolution, I think is also, it's not that we are moving away from analog planning. It still has a place in our heart. We use it every single day, right? But there's parts of that that had to be migrated to a different place to be able to do its job better.

1:16:17And I think that's also just a natural progression for a lot of people. It's like you stick with something for so long, but eventually something else comes along that maybe can just make that little part a little bit easier. And like, that's great. I can still appreciate what's happening, you know, in our home base of our paper planner and still respect what's happening outside of it as well. Yeah. I think that when it comes to the evolution of planning and such, I think that kind of like you said that default was OK, analog bullet journal or your paper planner or whatever.

1:16:47But there are also like a lot of other systems that can be very helpful along the way in terms of what my full suite, my fleet, my setup of my kind of organizational tools right now, I would have the Everyday Journal. So that's where the weekly dashboards go, daily logging, all of that kind of thing. That's kind of, funnily enough, one I use every day, given the fact that his name is Everyday Journal. I have ones that are more so for kind of memory keeping more than they are for productivity.

1:17:12That would be things like the five year journal, the reading journal. Those ones are just to kind of capture memories about the meteor I'm consuming or with just daily happenings and whatnot. And I do consider them to be planners, even though I'm not like forward planning for the most part in those spaces. We've obviously got, you know, the natural progression of the long term collections journal when all of the reference material decided to jump ship to Notion.

1:17:37Didn't really want to do that with my pen swatches though. So now I have a Swatch book, dedicated Swatch book, which I shan't be remaking. She says now, you know, catch me in 2 years where I'm like, I'm remaking my Swatch journal. But right now it's doing fine. I did also then bring in a health journal or kind of like health planner that was mainly for logging, you know, when I was doing exercise. We recently passed the 100 day streak of doing my exercise.

1:18:00Yes, thank you. Round of applause. I'm feeling pretty good about that, not going to lie. And I know that in part, being able to check off that tracker in the journal did hold me accountable to that. But those are kind of the analogue systems, and there's still a decent fleet of them. I know it's more than a lot of people have, but I like that separation. I like the compartmentalization. It helps just organize the information for me. But we also have all of the digital tools like Outlook. I'm not going to go and put things on a calendar or like draw out a calendar and then put them into my journal because then I don't have that timeline view. I really love the timeline view that you get on Outlook. And also, if something moves, which it does, you can just delete it or push it to another the day or whatnot. And you don't end up with a scribbling mess in your planner, which is really nice.

1:18:43It's also tied to my inbox. So if you get like an e-mail confirmation saying, hey, this is when you've booked in to do XYZ, this is your confirmation number. Make sure you keep it handy. You can just drag that into your Outlook calendar and then it's all there for you. It's all like captured in the one place. I don't have to print it off. I mean, sometimes I still print it off. I don't have to print it off though. I don't have to, even if sometimes I do. We've also got obviously a Notion, love it, developing that slowly.

1:19:09And my one true love, Excel, that's that's kind of like the staple through and through, probably because I started using it in Year 5 and I just haven't stopped. I love Excel so much. I also just love the fact that you're still like Beverly keeping like as a big part of what you're doing. Like from the earliest story, you know, hour and a half ago, we started talking about this. You know, we we started, you were like, yeah, I had a thing, but I was mostly memory keeping in there.

1:19:32I was writing down what I was doing when I was watching who I was hanging out with. Like I love that throughout your entire timeline of your journey, that is the one thing that's always stuck there. It's evolved, it's changed, it's matured, you know, it's become, you know, not just scribbles in a give me planner, but now a really nice notebook with like structure to it. Like that to me is really fun. Like to see that as a part of what you've done because I think that just kind of shows that that's just like been a part of you your entire life. You just needed to find a way and experience the products, the whatever it might be to like express. I didn't do that.

1:20:06And I think that's just super fun versus like you said, like having that on set of a notebook. If you're like, oh gosh, what was I doing? Blah, blah, blah years ago. And you're just like, wait, where did I put those photos? Like what did it, what happened? So I, I love that. I think that's like a really cool part about your story, specifically your journey with planning and just using stationary as a whole. It's like you've always done it. It just has taken on different forms. I like yours being from like chaos to Chaos Deluxe TM with fountain pen.

1:20:34Yeah, it's always been that. But I think that's just because that's how this brain works and it works really well with that chaos some days, you know, it just always kind of works there. But I love that it always has had good intentions. It's it's always helped me do my day job, which is really important. I've always said that like, you have to help me do that because without that none of this is possible, you know? No, I vary that what would be in your current organizational planning productivity fleet.

1:21:03I mean, my bullet journals where a lot of that stuff is living now, my work calendar is now become my digital space. I put even personal things in there too and just make them private and color them a different color than everything else. But that's mostly just as reminders for things. And then my phone, I'm now sending myself media invites from my work e-mail to go to my personal e-mail. So it shows on my phone and pops up. So like that's something that I'm noticing about myself now is like I need multiple notifications to remind me that something's going to happen.

1:21:34So that's a really easy way versus doing it twice in two different systems. I just do it one and send it to the other one. So like that's kind of really it. And then I have like a little bit of other fun stuff. I don't really consider anything else like really a planner way of me doing it. I did just move from Notion to Air table for my content planning and that has been good because I didn't love Notion just personally, but I I use air table like every single day for work. So I'm fully in love with it.

1:22:00So like I just move things over there and that's been really fun for me to do, but it was think it's more fun to set it up because I'm already behind and like already created more videos that weren't in my plan. That's just, you know, me Jess, I've done this for years. Every time I'm like, I'm going to make a content planner, I'm going to do this way and you're like go, mark, go. And I'm like 3 weeks later I'm like, so screw that. I've moved on to something else now just flying by the seat of my pants.

1:22:25That's still how I content plan. So you know, that's just, I mean you're right, it's chaos plus is now what it is. It's a perfect way to describe it. I do appreciate that even though Notion wasn't for you, at least you have air table. And I think the fact that you use it for work also just does help. You know, there's a lot of familiarity through using it that way as well, which just makes it a little bit easier. But Planner Pals, we would love to know what is your general evolution of your planning system been?

1:22:53Have you always been a planner? Have you only found planning in later life? Let us know in the comments or you can hit us up on Instagram at Planner Pals Podcast or flick us an e-mail at [email protected]. We've talked about everything from early years of either not planning or doodling inside of your planner all the way to where we are now. Our next episode is going to be a fun one. I think personally because you just had a really big life event and was very excited about that happening for you. What we're going to talk about utilizing your planners and notebooks to plan for life events. It could be for getting married, it could be starting a new job. It could be for so many things.

1:23:30So we talked about some ideas we've that we've done it as well. And it's always super fun to just, you know, share some new ideas with the planner pals And I just love it. It's so much fun. I love sharing. Well, I'm very much looking forward to getting into that topic with you, but as always, planner pals, thanks for watching.