When we watch the planning videos in YouTube, we may feel very inspired to start our planning journey. The problem is, what if there is nothing to write about or that we feel we simply live a very boring life?
Perhaps after binge watching all the videos we head on straight to Target, Staples or Office Depot and got ourselves the latest planner as used by our favourite YouTuber. But the entire excitement may just sizzle off when we just could not figure out just what to write inside it.
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Your may feel your life is uneventful, boring, and even sad compared to all the ‘productive’ YouTubers out there. When that happens, instead of getting ideas, the more planner videos you watch, the more overwhelmed or depressed you may feel.
First, no life is boring or uneventful. It is just a matter of how you perceive yourselves and compare to others around you. But if you insists….then….
How a planner can help transform your perceived ‘boring’ life.
1. Stay at home mom (SAHM)
Okay- let’s look at the majority of YouTubers who upload planning videos- those inspiring videos with stickers, decorations and all the bells and whistles. Most of them are stay-at-home moms or students who could have been leading what you call boring and uneventful life. A close friend of mine who choose to be a stay-at-home mom often get asked, “as a stay at home mom, you must have a lot of free time– so what do you do with all the time?”. That is the general perception.
But many stay-at-home moms choose to make their life more interesting and eventful. Many are talented and intelligent… but have consciously chosen to give up their successful careers because their family comes first. It is so easy to get demotivated because cleaning and changing dirty diapers are not that glamorous. They would feel overwhelmed because they have to juggle many tasks at once…. so they turn to planning to get their lives in order and for more motivation.
If they find nothing to write, then they would use their planner to list down all their tasks, errands and meal planning. They would also write down important appointments, birthdays and events. If the planning is done realistic enough, it will help them to become more organized.
Then they would notice that they actually have more pockets of time here and there that they have wasted on watching TV or doing some non value added tasks. Maybe they would get inspired by their favourite YouTubers and wanted to do something with their spare time such as starting a YouTube channel or blogging.
2. Student
A planner is very useful for a student especially to plan out a realistic study schedule after plotting in all other activities such as extra curricular activities, tuition, other roles and responsibilities, projects, part time job, etc. With a planner it is easy to see whether one would have enough time to study for exams.
3. A working adult with nothing else to do except work
You may feel your life have nothing to write about because your daily cycle may go something like this: wake up, prepare, commute, go to work in your crappy job, finish work, commute back, watch TV, sleep and repeat. Weekends is probably spent shopping or binge watching Korean dramas. Maybe sometimes you feel you are a loser, sometimes you feel a little sad, tired and demotivated.
The fact that you watch planner videos or found this blog post means that you wanted to do something interesting with your life. In your situation, a planner may just be your saving grace. One of the regrets I have was that I did not buy and use a planner when I was still in the corporate world. If I had use it, I would have better planned my time, my finances and would have more time to pursue my hobbies and blogging.
When you are using a planner and find you have nothing to fill up in that planner, then start with using it to plan what you wish to do better. If you find yourselves getting broke each month, perhaps you want to gear your planner towards budgeting and try to spend and live within your means.
Or if you wish to leave the job that you hate, don’t go all hasty and throw the resignation letter at your boss’s face. Use your planner to strategize. Plan up when you want to update your resume. If you want to do your own business or change the field of your work, then plot out the necessary steps that you need to get from where you are now to where you wanna go.
Let’s say you have an office job but wanted to move out to be a web designer. You would need to plan out how long it takes for you to learn the skill, where you learn it (nowadays there are online platforms to learn it online), build your own website, approach others to offer to build website for your portfolio, etc. Estimate how long it takes for you to acquire the skills and build the clientele/ reputation that you need before you can quit your job. And how much your current savings is going to last you if you cannot find a client.
Whether ‘boring’ or not is really how you perceive yourself. Don’t care what others think because it is your life that you are talking about. Look at me, for example. I am a full time caregiver, an unpaid housemaid and a blogger. I gave up a successful corporate career to care for my mom and do housework. From the outside, it looked uneventful.
Yet because it is a conscious decision I made, and after I added blogging into the mix, I found my mojo back. A planner is useful because I helps me to determine the available slots (after plotting in duty time) I could work on my blog and from there, estimate a realistic timeline to achieve my blogging goals. Being a non confirmist, I don’t always follow to the “T” but it gives me a good guideline on what I need to work on.
So I hope that if right now you feel you have nothing to put in your planner, start by putting in the daily activities. Okay, at worst if nothing at all, then just decorate with stickers for the first month. After using for a while and realizing you have lots of time in your hands, perhaps some ideas may start forming and you may be able to discover some aspirations or goals that you can actually work towards. Then use your planner and make a secret master plan on how you can achieve domination in your world.
