So the other day I was scrolling on Facebook (yes I know!) and I realized that it was that time of year when everyone is looking for a perfect planner for the next year. 

Don't get me wrong, planners are awesome (you know I have one, and I'm gonna get into why I have one in a little bit). But in this post, I'm going to share with you why your 2021 planner won't make you more productive and what to do with your planner if you do get one.

This way you will actually be more productive without hustling, without burning yourself out. 

Comment below if you are getting a 2021 planner and want to use it better! 

Reason #1) Your expectations for the year to come

The question that I want to ask you is…

How many years have you gotten a new planner, set big goals for the year, and then halfway through you realize that you're not even working on your goals and you beat yourself up over it?

In the past, whenever I got a new planner, I would open it up, I would be so excited, I'd have all these amazing intentions for how to spend my time to be able to reach the goals that I have set. 

As you can imagine, you know what happens next, I get off track, something shifts. Something comes up and prevents me from reaching my goals. Whatever the case may be, I did not follow the perfect plan that I created in January and then I feel like I'm the one to blame. I am discouraged, I beat myself up over it and that's not the full truth of what actually happened. 

But there are so many reasons why we don't follow through with our original plans and goals that we set. And if 2020 has taught us anything about the world is that everything shifts. We need to be flexible with our goals, with our plans, with our schedules. 

So, if you often find yourself in that cycle of setting huge brand new goals and getting super excited at the beginning of the year, and then beating yourself up for not being able to follow through with it, know that this is a super common cycle that we are all set to. 

I am bringing this up now because, if you go into your planner before setting your huge high expectation goals for the year, you can come into it with full awareness of this cycle and set better goals. 

Personally, I don't set annual goals. There's a ton of research and reasons why but what I personally use and teach in my business is quarter planning.  So I have rough intentions of what I want my life to look like in a year but I never set hard goals or hard plans for the year.

I do them in quarter chunks because I know that things are going to shift internally, inside of myself the goals that I want to achieve and externally, around us. 

If you have not planned quarterly yet and you're in this cycle, I would definitely tell you to look into planning quarterly instead of annually. Sign up for my Q1 Planning workshop by clicking here.

Glorified to-do lists

The next reason why your 2021 planner won't make you more productive is that usually planners are just glorified to-do lists.

They're just pretty books that we write down lists in and lists don't work. They're good for a single purpose of just brain dumping but lists don't actually show us how much time we have and when we're actually going to get those tasks on our list done. 

I want to talk about the concept of a to-do list. To-do lists focus our attention and energy on all of the things that we have not done yet. This leaves us with this unaccomplished, unfulfilled, continue to beat yourself up, burned out, hustling type mindset and mentality, when our to-do lists never end.

I don't know a single person that is more productive when they feel behind, exhausted, and can never get enough stuff done.  For the people who are reading this and you’re thinking “oh my planner has places for me to write in my gratitude for the day, my top three” and all these other things that aren't just a to-do list, those are still things that you need to fill in and that you are going to beat yourself up about for not completing every single day.

I have so many clients and people in my personal life that tell me “Oh I'm bad because I didn't fill out my gratitude in my big three years”. Whatever you want to call it of the day. Bottom line is that planners often make us feel like a failure or not good enough. So that is not going to make you more productive. 

I could talk about how to make to-do lists better for days and how to actually complete your to-do list without feeling crappy about yourself, which I have tons of blogs on... What I'll say here is that we need to pay more attention and energy to the things that we have accomplished and that we have gotten done. This is the opposite of feeling crappy about yourself. When you focus, acknowledge, reflect, and celebrate on all the things that you have done, you are more motivated, energized, fulfilled.  All of those feelings, are what you need to feel to continue that momentum and continue to get things done. 

In the beginning, I told you that I have a planner. Yes, I do have a paper planner but guess what I use my paper planner to do? I write all the things that I have done or I spent my time on. If I skip a day, I don’t beat myself up over it.  I either go back and fill it in or I literally just not fill it in because it doesn't define my worth. 

You can read this post all about the three things most people miss when they write a to-do list. It will help you figure out maybe some things that you need to start incorporating into your time management systems and organization.

Our planners don’t include rest time

The third reason why your 2021 planner will not make you more productive is that our planners don't mention rest. Most of the time, a lot of people have a hard time resting, if it's even possible for them to rest. Even though the majority of us probably know that resting and taking time away from our to-do lists and our tasks is what is actually going to make us more productive, we still can't do it.

In sense, our planners do not encourage us to rest, to have quality time with our family, to knit, to watch Netflix…yet again. 

Our planners encourage us to stay exhausted, burnt out, hustling, and focusing on the things that we have not done yet so it makes rest even harder for us.

Again, those things are not going to make you more productive. So what to do instead is to have rest included in your planner. If it's not already, we need to shift our mindset to making rest and quality time with ourselves and our loved ones a non-negotiable that comes first before anything else, if it's possible for you. 

Obviously, we need to work enough to survive to pay our bills. Which is a whole other discussion around how our society is keeping us in these vicious cycles. However, we all can take a moment, whether it's just a second to take a deep breath. That needs to be in our planners, our schedules and that needs to be non-negotiable. 

The mindset shift that I needed to make in my life is that my to-do list, my tasks will truly never end. That is literally being alive, we are human.

The things that we need to do will never cease to exist. So we need to understand that in order to think “Okay, I can take some time, put my to-do list aside and actually rest”. When we have a mindset that thinks “when I just finish xyz then I can rest”, there's no finishing, there's no end, there's no being done. 

I'll just say here as a caution or a warning sign is that when you start to rest it's going to feel uncomfortable. When you do try to rest and relax, your brain starts racing.  That is the conditioning inside of us around working, just know that you are doing it right. It is not an easy thing for any of us, so I just wanted to mention that to encourage you to continue to rest even when it feels uncomfortable. That is the journey that we are all on together. 

All in all, planners really do a heck of a job reinforcing the things that we have not done. Which encourages us to continue to be exhausted, to continue to be burnt out, to continue to be stretched thin. None of those feelings or states are conducive to being productive, to get the things that we need to get done. 

In order to be truly more productive in your life, it usually takes more than just writing down on a piece of paper. There is usually a ton of mindset work that needs to go into it. True change comes from going inwards and doing the internal work to heal ourselves. We need to be able to seek better lasting solutions without having to hustle, burn ourselves to the ground, and being stretched thin in every capacity. 

If you got anything out of this post just remember to focus on the things that you have done and be able to reflect and celebrate those things. That is what is going to help you be more productive, that is going to help you feel more motivated and energized. 

If you have any comments or questions, feel free to pop them below. I would love to talk with you more about how planners don't necessarily make us more productive and what you are going to do to make a change in your planning.

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