How I use my Passion Planner for reflection and personal growth
I love digital tools and automation and anything that makes my job easier as much as the next girl. But I also love my Passion Planner and have used one for years. Each one holds so many good memories and insights that I hold onto them all. I firmly believe that looking backward is just as important as looking forward when it comes to planning, and my Passion Planner is a huge part of how I do that.
Keep reading to find out how a digital calendar and paper planner can complement each other, some specific ways I use my passion planner, my color-coding system, and some questions I use to reflect and stay focused.
Digital calendar vs. paper planner
Are you the kind of person who loves to have a physical paper planner and make it really pretty with multicolored pens and stickers, but struggles with the fact that you also need a digital calendar? The secret is to use them for different things.
Here's how I do it: I use my digital calendar to plan and my planner to track. This way, my planner stays pretty: I still get to color-code and there are no more ugly marks when things get rescheduled. On top of that, using my planner to track and reflect helps me maintain my self-care and work-life balance.
Use your calendar to plan for the future. Use your planner to track the past.
I use Sunsama as my digital planner; it pulls meetings from my calendar and tasks from ClickUp. This makes it super easy to plan out my day.
Then I use my Passion Planner to track habits, goals, how I spend my time, and to journal. At the start of the week, I pencil in any appointments from my digital calendar so that I remember to check it. But as I go through my day, I highlight my time based on what I did.
Let me show you what I mean.
Track habits and goals
When it comes to setting goals and building habits, I have five areas that I try to hit each day. At the bottom of each week in my Passion Planner, I have five short columns labeled with an icon for each area. They are:
☀️ Personal Growth: Read a book, practice a language
❤️ Gratitude: Write down three good things that happened
💧 Spirituality: Say a prayer, read my Bible
🏋️♀️ Health: Do a workout, go outside
🏡 Home: Do the dishes, sweep the floors
My goal is to hit each one of these each day, but that doesn't always happen. I used to feel really bad when I couldn't check off all my goals on a given day.
Now, instead of feeling bad, I take time to reflect on what I accomplished. For example, maybe I didn't sweep and mop like I intended—but I managed to wipe down the counters. Well, I'm going to write that down.
I choose not to focus on what I didn't do and to celebrate what I did. That's what keeps me motivated for the next day.
Track Your Day
It is especially helpful to track your days when you feel like you don't have enough time or that important things are slipping through the cracks. It might seem counterintuitive, but taking a few minutes throughout the day to track how you spend your time can reveal patterns and areas for improvement.
So instead of filling the planner with how you want things to go, use it to reflect on how things actually went. To make it fun and informative at a glance, I like to color-code my day.
My color coding system
OK, I love to color-code! I have a five-color system for tracking how I spend my time. I highlight my day with one of these five colors as I go through it.
🩷 Social Events
💛 Personal Productivity (things like cooking, reading, language learning, or anything else that's actually productive)
💚 Work
🧡 Mental Health
💙 Spirituality
If you're familiar with time-boxing (what planner aficionado isn't?), the end result looks very similar. The big difference is that it happens afterward.
I also have matching pens—for all you curious pen people, they are Pilot Precise rollerballs in all the colors—so that I can categorize my habits, dreams, or goals when I write them down. I can track all the things that are important to me, and it's all very pretty.
Passion Planner vs. High Performance Planner
I've been a Passion Planner girl for a long time, but in early 2022, I felt like I was putting too much effort into it. I wanted something fresh, some inspiration, so I decided to try a different planner.
I picked up the High Performance Planner. It's a great planner: it's large, built well, and feels nice. It also has some great trackers and questions in the back. But I hate it! It's a great planner, but it's not for me. It is very large and not very bendy—and it turns out I like my planners to be as flexible as my emotions.
I wanted to love it but didn't. So I took inspiration from those nice trackers and questions and went back to my Passion Planner.
Passion Planner Daily vs. Weekly
The Passion Planner comes in Daily and Weekly formats. If you're wondering which one I use, well, I use both.
I like the Weekly for tracking my goals, habits, and how I spend my time through the week. But the Daily has its place too.
I actually love the Daily for journaling in the mornings. Based on the trackers and questions in the High Performance Planner, I added a daily journal guide to my Passion Planner Daily.
My Daily Journal Guide
These are questions or prompts that guide my journaling and help me get the most out of it.
What is the most important task or job of the day?
What habit am I working on this month? What three things can I do today to achieve this habit?
What task or habit can I complete to nurture the five areas of my life?
What miscellaneous tasks need to be done today?
Various same-day trackers and metrics
I am ...
What is the best thing that happened yesterday?
A quote or scripture that inspires me today.
How do I want to feel today?
Visualize how I'd like to spend my day.
How do I feel this morning?
Daily journaling: a) five objectives I'm working on, b) five things I'm grateful for, c) three wins from yesterday, d) how I can improve my environment, e) I need to let go of ...
Strategy starts with reflection
The takeaway here is that reflecting on where you've been and what you've done is an important part of planning for the future. It keeps you grounded, lets you celebrate your wins, and reveals opportunities. It's useful on the small scale of calendars and planners/trackers, but absolutely critical when thinking about longer-term goals and strategy.
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