How have I ended up using four things for planning??

It struck me the other day that I seem to have migrated to using four things for daily planning:

• the planning filofax
• the daily carry-around
• a vertical WO2P in an A5 filofax
• a reporters' notebook

What??? I thought I was all streamlined into a compact filofax! How did this happen??

Well, it's actually not as bad as it sounds. Honest! I realise that what I have done is just reproduce the system I always used to have, but distributed it over several things in order to use a slimline as a carry-around.

My system has almost always (well, since I have had a 'system') included:

• a goals to projects to next actions section (which is now in the planning filofax along with spare diary pages - see here for how I get that to work)
• a week to view for an overview (which is still in the carry-around)
• a daily list + a daily plan (which I used to have on DPP in the carry-around when I had the ring-space, with appointments/time-sensitive tasks down the left and the rest of the daily list on the right)

It's this last bit that has morphed into two separate things I suppose. Patty from Homemakers Daily did a good post (read it here) about the difference between a  daily list and a daily plan. For me, the daily list - the list of things I need to do today - is going in the reporters' notebook. Then each morning I am drawing up my daily plan which is getting time-boxed into the vertical WO2P in the A5.

I had been doing that on the WO2P in the de Villiers, with the daily-list on the right of each day-box and the plan on the left, but it was starting to get too crowded when I had lots of 'mosquito tasks' to clear and so I started scrawling things in the notebook. I could just move back to using a DPP, the way I always used to and keep everything in one place, but at the moment I am still off work and so still based at home on a daily basis and I have a big desk and an A5 diary to use up and a stack of reporters' notebooks to use up, so why either buy or print up DPP?

No doubt I will go back to the 'all in one' binder at some point, but this is working okay for me at the moment (and handily using up the A5 diary and rubbish notebooks!).

Anyone else find that they think they've started using a new system, only to realise it's the old system in different clothes?