Week 15’s spread of the 52 Planners in 52 Weeks Challenge was a bit different to usual. I went away for the Easter long weekend to Adelaide to visit a friend. So I pulled out a notebook and drew up a non-typical weekly layout.

BEFORE THE PEN

I combined by my favorite elements of weekly planners:

• Habit tracker
• Don’t forget section
• And a bit of color :)

Along with the usual things to plan such as blog posts and meal planning.

I’ve become a tad obsessed with looking at bullet journal spreads on Instagram and watching planner YouTube Videos. I like the simplicity behind bullet journalling but the spreads looking a bit too plain for my liking. So I adapted some weekly spread ideas I’d seen and added some highlighter to give the spread a little pop of color!

I used one of my Plum Paper notebooks.

Related: Plum Paper Planners Haul & Review (better than the Erin Condren?)

I split the right side of the page into 4 equal sections for the days I’d be away.

PENS USED

For the titles I used the Staedtler Triplius Color 10.mm (they’re from Officeworks in the coloring tools section)

I can’t remember the black pen I used – it was one of my many ballpoint pens!

Related: Favorite black pens for planner addicts

HIGHLIGHTERS USED

I wanted to experiment / compare the quality of more expensive highlighters (the Stabilo Swing cool) with cheaper highlighters (ones I got from Woolworths for half the cost of the Stabilo highlighters).

The green, orange and yellow were the cheap highlighters. As you can see in the photos below, the colors weren’t nearly as vibrant!

FINISHED SPREAD

I used icon stickers (half inch square in size) to record what places I planned to visit while on the trip.

STICKERS USED:

• Half inch travel icons (printable) from my shop. More travel icon stickers
• Flight arrival and depart times sticker (1.5” x 0,5” high – they fit the width of the Erin Condren vertical life planner (printable) from my shop
• Spending tracker (dollar sign) stickers from my sister’s shop, Carefully Crafted

PROS OF THIS SPREAD

• This spread was inspired by bullet journaling – I do like the flexibility that comes with being able to create your own spread.
• I liked the minimalism of the stickers – they broke up the pen but there weren’t so many stickers that it looked cluttered. I considered using stickers for the titles liked I used in week 8, but opted to do something different and use pen – I like how it turned out J
• The use of highlighters was a simple but effective way to add some color to the page
• The habit tracking space was large enough that I had room to keep a tally of water intake (although I forgot to fill this out on the trip)

I used the MAMBI checklist self-inking stamp (my favorite stamp!) to create the square boxes) for the blog posts and don’t forget sections.

CONS OF THIS SPREAD

• I knew I wanted to do a custom spread this week, but it took a lot longer than I expected to come up with a space efficient design. I don’t think bullet journaling would be an ideal planning method for me for every week as it takes a long time to set up. A lot longer than using a planner that already has a weekly layout printed and you just fill in the info
• The daily planning space of this layout was fine for this non-typical planning week, but I tend to prefer more structured layouts where I just fill in the blanks with the relevant info

OTHER WAYS TO USE THIS LAYOUT

• If you don’t have a blog you could remove that section and turn it into a to do list

• Remove the meal planning section and make it a top 3 tasks instead, or birthdays and events this week

• If you wanted to use this for weekly planning, add extra lines to the right page to create 8 sections per day (2 columns) or split the page into 7 sections horizontally

…AND A COUPLE OF PHOTOS FROM MY TRIP TO ADELAIDE IF YOU’RE INTERESTED!

The Barrosa Valley

The McLaren Vale region (on the way to Victor Harbour) – I actually thought this region had nicer landscapes than the Barrossa

Hahndorf (German town) – the color of the trees were so pretty in autumn!

Leaving Adelaide…

CATCH UP ON PAST WEEK’S OF THE CHALLENGE:

• Week 8: Weekly Planning using the Plum Paper Memory Keeper Book
• Week 9: Customising the Erin Condren hourly planner for task based planning
• Week 10: Minimalist 1 page planning using washi tape
• Week 11: How to plan your week using Trello
• Week 13: Using a Kmart lists book to plan your week (planning by task, rather than by day)

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