Personal Size Filofax – Blog Planning

     Regular readers of my blog will know that usually at the end of the month I do a monthly catch up post where I link to all the posts from that month so you can check you haven’t missed anything and also show some pictures of the blog section of my planner. Well, I’m working on a slightly different blog schedule at the moment and still trying to decide if I’ll continue with the catch up posts so for now, I’m not. If enough people want them, I’ll start doing them again but I’m not sure how useful people found them. I still want to show off my blog section a little bit though and go about explaining how I do my planning.

     With that said, I’ll get to showing you my blog planning section now!

     So I have three sections in my personal sized Filofax: weekly (to-do lists), blog and lists. Much like my weekly spread section, I haven’t felt the need to change my blog planning section for 2017 as it seems to be working for me at this present moment in time.

     While I’m very particular about the weekly spread I use (because the wrong layout really does impact on productivity!), I’m not too picky about the blog planner spread. I simply use the week per page Filofax inserts to keep track of things. As you can see, on the backside of the dashboard I have utilised the space for storing sticky notes as these are something I do use a bit when it comes to blog planning, or more actually, covering up my plans.

     I used to only plan posts for Puddleside Musings, but for 2017, I’ve decided to start posting things more on Idle Spot (my art blog) as well so that means that blog planning has gotten a little bit busier. I’ve now got five posts a week to write so planning and keeping to a schedule is really important! Here, days highlighted in green are for Puddleside Musings and days highlighted in blue are for Idle Spot.

      I’m not sure how long I’ll keep it up but I’ve tried to colour code blog topics so red is for snail mail, light purple is for planners, dark purple is for crafts, blue is for drawings and green is for journaling.

     For planning, I have a topic schedule I like to keep so if it’s a planner topic, I’ll find a suitable Monday to have that post go out and write a rough title – usually something just like ‘Blog Planner post’. This isn’t usually what the title here is but it’s something that gives my an idea of what the post will be. Sometimes, this is all I write in the box as it’ll be pretty self-explanatory and don’t need to take note of anything else. Other times, I’ll write quick notes along side. It could be the particular brand of product I used or a note to remind me to take a picture of something.

     Sometimes I’ll have something planned but need to change it up so that’s where the sticky notes come in. I cover up the original plan with sticky notes and used a little bit of washi tape to help stick it down and then just write on top.

     It looks a little messy but I don’t have the time or money to decorate my blog planning section as much as my weekly! Plus, I only look at it once a week when I’m writing blogs versus every day for my weekly section so I don’t mind the mess in it.

     So that’s my blog planning section. It’s simple but it does the job! Usually, I have about a month of posts planned ahead. Not written, just planned. I write posts the week before and schedule them. It helps me keep on top of things so I don’t have to scramble for an idea last moment!

     Are you the type to plan or do you just write posts whenever you have an idea and feel like it? If you plan, how do you do it?