Congratulations on your decision to start using a daily planner. I’m covering the psychological reasons to use a planner as your first lesson because I truly believe everyone should use a planner and it is miraculous how many ways something as simple as a planner can change your life completely.
What stops many people from using one is being a little intimidated by it, not knowing how to set it up, and feeling like they won’t be consistent with it.
5 Psychological Reasons To Use A Planner For Optimal Success As An Exhausted Spoonie
Worry no more, I’m going to go through the psychological reasons to use a planner, and why it’s going to be so good for you.
Why Everyone Should Use a Planner
You might be aware of the basics about using a daily planner, however, I doubt that you’ve stopped to consider the intense psychological benefits that being organised has.
Not only for your mental health, but your life overall.
Psychological Reasons To Use A Planner; It Helps with Time Management
Do you find that there is never enough time for everything?
While being late can be a symptom or warning sign of certain mental health issues, including stress, there’s a chance that you don’t actually schedule your time effectively.
Something I noticed as a disabled and chronically ill business woman, people wanted you to work for a set amount of money which often times would have meant working for less than minimum wage.
When you don’t value your own time, it’s rare the will value the time of anyone else.
As a chronically ill woman with very limited energy in the day, I truly value my time and the energy that I do have.
Using a planner allows you to schedule each event, appointment, brain dump or task.
Doing that means you know what to expect, will more likely be prompt and procrastinate a little less.
You can also set specific due dates and deadlines for everything to help you stay on track, and have extra time left for yourself and family.
Psychological Reasons To Use A Planner;You Can Improve Your Productivity
This is important for your personal and professional life. While many people think of productivity as it relates to their job, you also want to be productive in most areas of your life.
Again, as a disabled woman, I have to break down and simplify every single task. From getting out of bed in the morning to washing my hair or getting washed.
Your planner and schedule might include things you want to get done, such as getting cleaning and home organization done, or working on projects you keep putting it off. Add a due date for these tasks and you are far more likely to succeed.
Put a specific date by each goal that represents when you would like to have it achieved.
Business Know How
The more short-term goals you create, the better, because it will fill you with more confidence as you achieve them on your road to even greater success
Regardless of what it is, planners help you to stay on track with each individual task you need to complete, and encourages you to move on to the next one effectively and efficiently.
Psychological Reasons To Use A Planner; They Provide Excellent Stress Relief
Stress has many forms, but one thing they all have in common is that it comes from being overwhelmed.
The most common reasons for stress are:
Work – feeling pressure at work, unemployment or retirement
NHS
Family – relationship difficulties, divorce or caring for someone
Financial problems – unexpected bills or borrowing money
Health – illness, injury or losing someone
Outside influences do also affect your stress level, but think of how different it could be when you actually have time for everything and are able to seamlessly go from one responsibility to the next without having to worry about missing something, being late, or having to back out at the last minute.
There are a Multitude of Health Benefits To Use A Planner
As you might imagine, planners help you stay healthy in a wide range of ways.
It helps your physical health by helping you track things like diet and exercise.
This can easily be done using habit trackers (there are several habit trackers available in Patreon – many of which are slowly being added to the site for you).
With The Help Of Your Planner You can
- Schedule health appointments
- Add reminders to reorder prescriptions
- Reminders or scheduling physical exercise, whether that is doing very basic physical therapy exercises or a full on workout
- Plan menus ahead for the week or month
- Brain dump ideas for how to improve your health and what to try in the future (don’t overwhelm yourself with too many at once. Having this list to refer back to in the future is very useful)
- Add an index to your planner so you can keep track of all these things
- Schedule in time for fresh air and vitamin D
- Schedule and track your self love and self care
- Save your favourite affirmations that make you feel like you can achieve anything in life (they can be incredibly beneficial for your mental health)
There are also many mental health benefits by reducing stress and anxiety, and even having journaling pages for when you just need a good brain dump.
Psychological Reasons To Use A Planner; Don’t know what a brain dump is?
Basically, you dump all of your thoughts onto a page. It can be incredibly helpful as it stops the same thoughts from continuing to swirl in our minds.
It’s a little like clearing your browser cache.
Psychological Reasons To Use A Planner; More Time for Creative Activities
Another benefit of using a planner is that because you are sticking to a schedule for all the mandatory responsibilities, it leaves a little free time for your artistic endeavors, whether that means working on a hobby or trying something new like booking an art therapy session.
Please note that you need ZERO artistic skills for art therapy. Art therapy is not about creating beautiful finished art work and pieces.
It’s about you discovering your emotions through creative play, without negative judgement, with creative curiosity.
To Conclude These Psychological Reasons To Use A Planner
If that weren’t reason enough to start using a planner, I don’t know what could convince you!
Even if you aren’t a natural organiser, you can always get yourself a planner and set an intention to check in with your planner every day.
Start with one thing.
Whether you want to plan the week ahead of you or just tomorrow.
Putting pen to paper is the small action required daily, that adds up to huge transformational life changes.
The mistake that most people make is focusing on the huge changes, which ends up becoming overwhelming. Which in turns makes us often times give up on our goals completely and continue living life on autopilot.
Simply focus on the stepping stone in front of you.
READY TO CO-CREATE THE LIFE YOU’VE ALWAYS DREAMT OF AS A CREATIVE SOUL?
Click below to find out how to work with me, Claire DB, art therapist and transformative life coach and master manifestor, on my signature 8 Week CBT based success coaching program