Isn’t this a beauty!  I treated myself to this planner from personal-planner.co.uk just before I went on maternity leave.  As my regular readers will know, I’m on an eternal hunt for the perfect planner to keep my life organised.  I often end up making my own just so that I can have what I need.  This year, I thought I’d give this a go, and treat myself to a personalised diary.  I knew I would need something smaller than the ‘day-to-a-page, A4 tome’ that I carry around with me at work like some kind of security blanket.  But I also knew that I couldn’t cope with just using the calendar on my phone.  I’m a pen and paper gal – the prettier the better!

When you visit the website there’s a number of ways you can personalise the diary to suit your needs.  You start by choosing the size and cover design and text.   You can upload your own photo, but I chose this bird theme as I noticed you could link it when you chose your theme for the diary pages inside.  I love this mint green colour – I find it very restful and that’s definitely what I need this year!

You then work on personalising your diary pages and I thought that there were some good features here.  On the A5 version you can include up to 3 personalised modules from 13 different choices.  I chose a meal planner, preschool planner and a blank space that I use to write a quote for the week.  On Sunday I write my household job for the week from my list –  this doesn’t mean that I plan to complete it on Sunday, but I know it needs to be done by then.

At the back there’s a yearly overview sheet and some useful pages for keeping records if you’re a teacher (though you can opt to substitute these with lined/ squared paper).  There’s also colour coded marks down the side of each page for each month.

I’m currently scribbling all sorts of things in my planner, Baby T’s nap times are featuring heavily at the moment as we try to work out where his natural nap times are so that we can plan our day around them.  I’m also wearing a pedometer in an attempt to keep active, so I record how many steps I’ve done at the end of each day.  I plan my blog posts on the relevant days and tick them off when they’re written, though this needs work as I’m not posting as regularly as I would like to – life seems to get in the way!

I think part of the reason things are getting missed is because it’s a weekly planner.  I need to have a monthly overview sheet for my blog postings and would like to record my blog stats somewhere too.

I wanted to trial this planner while I was off work to see if it would work for life and work but I don’t think it’s going to. I don’t think there’s enough room for all of my work to do lists and notes.  Unfortunately they don’t produce an A4 planner which is what I think I’ll end up needing when I go back to work.     I’ve been playing about with some printables to see if I can make my own planner that works for me when I return to work in September but I need to research printing costs to see if it’s worth printing my own.

This post is not sponsored by personal-planner.co.uk – all opinions are my own.