I'm sure we've all had that experience at the beginning of the year, when we are faced with the responsibility of buying a new diary. I take the idea that my choice will stay with me for the entirety of the year, very seriously. I know that sounds kind of dramatic but honestly...I can't help it!. I wanted to make sure that the diary I chose was the right one for me which meant I wanted to it to be fully customisable to my needs. After much deliberation I decided to go with a planner from Personal Planner UK. The level of personalisation available to you at creation is amazing, you really can change almost every aspect of the planner to how you would like.
There are four sizes to choose from, I just chose a standard A5 planner, but there is also a square version which looked really good. I wanted to make sure I could fit the size I chose in my bag, so I stuck with the A5 at a price of £19.95.
You are able to customize your front and back covers by using a block colour or you can upload a picture. I took full advantage of this and created a collage in PicMonkey, for the back cover and to enable me to insert a quote on the front cover. If you want more than one picture to appear on your cover this is the best way to achieve that, because you cannot upload multiple pictures using the website.
Almost everything is customisable within the week-to-view space, I chose the a grey theme with small white stars. You can have the days horizontal or landscape, ruled or blank or even striped with different colours. The bottom of the page is split into what they call modules, there are all sorts of options for these sections. You can choose, a to do list, graph paper, or leave it blank, you can even insert a module to plan your dinners for the week!
Personal Planner stood out to me especially because of their personal dates feature. When you are creating your planner, you are able to enter all of your personal dates for the year, I mainly inserted birthdays! All you do is put in the persons name and their birthday with the year they were born. When the planner is printed all of your dates are entered into the correct dates with the age that person is going to be. You can see this in the picture above on the 17th February, it was my birthday! This is such a nice way to keep track of all your important dates throughout the year, and if you decided to get another Personal Planner for the following year, you can carry across all of your dates!
The remainder of the planner is split into three, and you can choose what you want to have within these sections. The choice again is vast, you can have sudoku puzzle pages or graph pages, also there is an option for you to create your own address book if you want to! I chose to have a year-to-view, colouring pages (because you all know you still love colouring) and just standard lined paper because I'm a listoholic!
Just in case you lost your planner, there is a space for you to write a message, for who ever should find it on the front page. But, I decided personalise this page with a quote, this is one of my favourites from Harry Potter.
Planner Decoration
I try to use as much colour as possible when decorating my planner, the staedtler pastels pens are great as well as all forms of washi tapes ( I found most of my washi tapes in The Works). I found these emoji stickers on ebay and I think they're brilliant! You can find all sorts of stationary online and in shops like Paperchase to suit your own personal preference!
I know that putting such emphasis on your choice of diary, may not be very significant to a lot of people. But anything which helps me to organise myself better is welcomed, even if it only helps me to remember to update my utility meter readings (sad but true). I've been using my Personal Planner since January and I've been consistently utilising it as well as making it look pretty ever since. I would definitely like to think I will repurchase another for next year!