Hi lovely people!

Rachel here, with my first blog post for Cocoa Daisy, and I’m excited to share with you how I’ve set up my planner and journal for August. August is a quieter month for us, as it’s the school summer holidays in the UK, and so I have a slightly more streamlined set up as a result.

Firstly, let’s take a look at which planners I’m using:

I decided that with a kit that includes purple (thank you aubergines!) I had to take the opportunity to use my new Filofax Iris Malden personal rings. It’s a beautiful shade of purple, and complements the kit so well. For my B6 Dori, I chose a Foxy Fix Sugar Lilac (No 5 size). You can also see the fabulous sticker album that came with this month’s planner kits!

So – first stop is my personal rings…

The sideways card pockets inside the Malden make it a little more of a creative challenge to decide what to put there. When I saw the month at a glance journal card (from the Pocket Cards) and the emoji stickers in the Classified Planner Kit, I thought it would be fun to make a mood tracker to tuck in the front. Farmer Simon (how cute?!) is sitting just behind, to brighten up my day when I open my planner too!

I’ve picked out Mildliner pens to match the different emotions, and I’ll highlight each square. This is the second year that I’ve tracked my mood in some way, and I find it useful to see when I’m starting to struggle or when overwhelm is taking its toll, so I can make sure I take care of myself better.

The chalkboard pocket card on my front dashboard inspired me to find the leftover tabs from January 2019 – you could also use black cardstock instead of course – and label my weeks with them. I wrote on the dates with a white UniBall Signo Broad Gel pen and I’m really pleased with how it came out.

I used some of the bee stamps from August 2018 to mark when my daughters are in holiday clubs – that’ll keep them busy!

I decided to use the week on two pages for my usual weekly dashboard – I like to have a space to write down my main projects and key tasks for work, home and personal. I also set up spaces for social media tracking, budgeting and meal planning.

My other sections in my planner house my daily pages, yearly task lists, project notes and general reference and notes pages.

I use my B6 Dori as a space to journal and memory keep. I love the Simon card from the Classified Planner Kit this month, so it got pride of place in the inside front pocket! I used some of the memory keeping papers and pocket cards (which I bought separately) to make a laminated dashboard to wrap around my inserts. I like to have this in a single travellers’ notebook as it helps to add some stability for when I’m writing.

I fussy cut around one of the A5 dashboards and layered it on top of one of the planner papers to make my dori cover this month –  I think it came out really cute!

This will be the second month that I’ve used this particular layout in my journal. I use one horizontal section across both pages for each day. The left hand part is for my journaling/ photos from the day (or….if I get behind and miss out a day, I just put something pretty there from the kits! Thank goodness for stickers and die cuts!), and the right hand side is split into a section for gratitude and a creativity log.

My gratitude prompts come from Ann Voskamp’s 1000 Gifts Challenge, and the idea is that every day you find three things to fit with the prompt for that day. I find that creativity is crucial for my own wellbeing, and so it’s been fun to jot down what I’m doing each day that’s been creative – whilst I plan, journal, crochet and knit, somedays I don’t get time to do those, and so looking for other ways I’ve been creative in a day has been really interesting.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this look at my planner and journal set up for August – if you want a more in depth flip through, check out my video over on YouTube.

Until next time, take care lovely people!

Rachel xxx