Digital Planning and Why it Didn’t Work for Me

As mentioned in my post on Achieving Planner Peace, I used a couple of digital planners for a few months prior to moving on to my current system.

I bought an iPad Pro about a year ago, I wanted it for several things, including work, productivity, Dungeons and Dragons, creativity, and gaming. At the same time, I kept seeing videos on YouTube of folks using their iPads as digital planners. I thought the concept was interesting, and I was going through another phase of planner fail, so I thought I would check it out.

I knew I didn’t want to freehand a planner in an app like GoodNotes or Notability, I figured if I’m going to freehand my planner, I want it to be in hardcopy. So I browsed through Etsy for some premade planners I could use in GoodNotes.

I found a digital planner by ForLittleLion on Etsy, it’s a beautiful, minimalist design, and it was very functional. The planner was jam-packed with features and links.

I started using the planner in August 2020 and stopped using it in February, when I picked up the new digital planner, also from Etsy and started using it. I called it my “work planner” and hoped to use both at the same time. Spoiler alert, this didn’t work out. I used this one until April 2021, and I only used it sparingly.

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  Landing page for the Little Lion Planner

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  Monthly Spread

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  Daily Spread

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  Landing page for the second planner I tried

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  Monthly Spread

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  Daily Spread

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There are a lot of reasons I stopped using Digital Planners

• If I forgot to charge my iPad I was in big trouble.
• As mentioned in my previous post about planner fail, using two actual planners was not working out for me. Stay tuned for upcoming posts on my current system! Coming soon!
• My writing was messier than it would be on paper on the iPad, which was not okay for me.
• I was again wanting to use my planner for documentation but didn’t like how it looked – while the format and aesthetic of the planner itself was professional, it looked unpresentable.
• Sometimes it’s easier and faster to just write something down on an actual piece of paper or a physical notebook.

Things I did enjoy about the Digital Planners

• The whole entire planner was linked, with thousands of links, making it really easy to navigate.
• I loved the fact that there was a “meeting notes” page and that I could duplicate it an infinite amount of times. It was difficult to organize though.
• There was no need to carry an additional notebook and my iPad, my shoulders thanked me for the short amount of time that I used this solution.
• This solution was sustainable and environment-friendly.

Even though Digital Planning didn’t work for me, I would still recommend giving it a shot because it is a more modern and sustainable option. I, myself, will continue using some of the pages from these planners for other projects.

I will be posting about my current solution over the next few days, stay tuned for more on that!

Until then, keep on keeping on folks!

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