What will you do tomorrow? Will you plan it or maybe just let it flow? Familiar question? Yes? I have been using a method for a few years now that brings   imagination and the logical self into daily planning. I’d like to share it with you today. Maybe this method will entice your creative imaginative self into your planning.

I believe each person has to consider their own nature in  finding their unique way  organizing their daily life activities.  I’m remembering an old boss of mine that assigned her new personal secretary the job of planning not her day, but rather her  filing system. Once it was done she could not find anything. It was a shock to her. She was so angry at this woman that she fired her. Unfortunately, at that point she not only had lost access to her files, she lost access to the one who knew how to find them.  That has always stayed with me. A bit funny, and definitely a lifelong lesson for me. We need to be in charge of our own planning.

So, let’s get back to…how do we decide what we are going to do today? There are numerous books and strategies on this. I have read many and tried some. You’ve seen them too: day timers, notebooks, crash courses, on-line strategies.  While  these may hold merit, I’d like to introduce you to a little creative tool that I have used as an adjunct to these other methods.

Let’s call it ..Create Three Images. It chunks the day into three sections.  It builds upon the idea that we need to focus on three things that are important, not ten or seven or twenty. It helps organize the mind with the threes, especially helpful for those of us that expect to do so much in a day.

These are the 8 steps:

1. Decide whether you prefer to plan the evening before or the morning of the day. Frequently, I do it the morning. But lately I have had success with planning the night before the day.

2. Choose a notebook for the planning. I like small or medium size and prefer unlined paper.

3. Create a little ritual i.e. Choose a place to sit. Gather what else you would like or need (water, tea, coffee, felt pens, blanket etc.)

4. Settle in to your body. For example  breathing, grounding, stretching, writing, listening to music.  Give yourself some time for the daily planning.  Reflect upon your day and divide it into three chunks e.g. morning afternoon, evening or early a.m. late a.m and afternoon. Any way you wish to think about your whole day or your work day is doable.

5. Hold  your awareness on one of the chunks.  Draw or doodle an image that might represent the essence of the first chunk. Maybe it will look like a triangle, a staircase, a star, a person lying down, a flower in bloom. Do this two more times.

6. Then be curious about what you might do in response to the images. For example I might see that the triangle could represent the three clients I am going the see in the afternoon. I might put the initials of each of them in the corners. The doodle image of person lying down might trigger my awareness that this evening will be for relaxing and self-care.
7. Now fill in some spaces. You might want to add texture and colour to the images to give them more form. You might also want to put in little circles between the images that represent the transitions from one section of the day to the next. This might be lunch or a walk or a drive.

8. Place it somewhere you can refer to it, add notes to your on-line calendar or paper calendar. Perhaps even use it as a check list or to acknowledge “Acts of Victory”.

This way of planning can be a lot of fun. It can be as systematic as you want it to be.  It can be something you can look back on. I absolutely love to do it and am often delighted by the images that come up and the shapes that have begun to have a consistent role to my planning.  For me, it follows a morning writing or an evening reflection.   Let me know how it goes. You can contact me through the contact page.