Tips for Transitioning into a New Planner & 18- Month Happy Planner Review

It’s planner launch season again! In the spring, planner companies release their academic year planners (which run from summer to summer) as well as planners that have 16, 17, or 18 months’ worth of planning layouts. These run from the summer of the present year through December of the next year. (I wrote about the virtues of these extended planners in this post).

I’m so excited that I was able to pick up my next year’s 18-month planner, which I use to plan out my household chores, fitness routine, and self-care (for more on how I use my planner to take care of myself and my home, see this post).  Since I like to decorate my planner pages, I love using a classic, vertical Happy Planner with minimal design. This year, I decided on the Heartland Happy Planner, which I will review below.

While it is always fun to get a new planner, it can be daunting to transition from one book to another. One reason some people like digital planners is because once you enter the information into the program, you can set it up to work like a perpetual calendar. With paper planners, you will likely have to transfer some information from your current planner to your new one.

Despite the annual setup, many people still enjoy their paper planners, and I’m one of them. And, since I’ve been using them for so long, I have some tips to share to help make the yearly planner transition a little easier.

This week’s post will feature must-try tips for moving into a new planner as well as a quick review of this year’s 18-month classic vertical Happy Planner.

8 Must-Try Tips for Transitioning Into Your Next Paper Planner

Depending on how you use your planner, your setup may be faster or slower than someone who uses theirs in a different way. That said, there are some tips for making the setup go more quickly, no matter how you put your planner to use. Here are some of my best tips:

1. Make time and space to setup your planner. Even with these tips, your planner will not be set up in five minutes. So, set aside an hour or two to work on it. And, while you’re at it, get your space prepped for planning. In the same way I suggest setting yourself up to work on your yearly goal prep work (see this article here), make sure you create a positive environment for setting up your planner. Have a desk or table with space to plan and make sure your supplies (pens, highlighters, stickers, washi, whatever) are within easy reach. Feel free to wear comfy clothes, listen to fun music, and have snacks and beverages that you’ll enjoy while planning (just make sure they aren’t within spilling distance of your planner).

2. Decide if you’re decorating. There is no requirement that you have to decorate your planner. It may be just right the way it is or maybe decorating isn’t your thing. If that’s the case, feel free to move on to the next tip. However, if you like to decorate your planner in any way, you might want to consider whether you want to spend some of your setup time adding some embellishments. For folks who like to decorate their planners, there are a few different ways to go about it. Some people like to decorate the whole planner all in one go. These are usually folks who like to place a few stickers or washi tape on their pages and would rather not fuss with having to spend time decorating during the rest of the year. I do this for my faith planner- it’s all ready to go and I don’t have to worry about it. Or, you might want to decorate on a monthly or weekly basis. I have a catch-all planner where I add a little washi tape and stickers on each page. I do this by the month so I can change the theme to whatever suits my mood that month. My Happy Planner weekly that I use for personal planning, like I’ll be using this Heartland planner, is one I like to decorate weekly. That’s because I’ve gotten into using sticker kits and sticker books that have one theme for a week’s worth of vertical layouts. There’s no right or wrong way to do it. Just decide and make sure you have your supplies ready to go.

3. Figure out what’s constant. There are going to be some things you list in your planner every single year. Make sure you know what these are. Here are some ideas for things that happen on an annual basis:

• Birthdays
• Bills and regularly scheduled payments
• Favorite meals (arranged by the season)
• Contact information for doctors, schools, the vet, etc.
• Annual school reminders (e.g., turning in immunization records, volunteering sign ups, registering for summer camps), work, or family events
• Annual appointments (e.g., annual physicals, specialist appointments, pet checkups, etc.)
• Recurring to do lists

4. Use sticky notes. I am a huge fan of office supplies, and I think that sticky notes have to be one of the best office supplies ever invented. (Seriously, it deserved some sort of peace prize given the serenity is has brought my life). Because they usually can be removed several times before losing their ability to stick, they are perfect for writing down some of those constants for your planner. I have all of my main contacts on sticky notes, and each year, I just lift them up and move them to the next planner. I suggest using the notes pages in the back of your planner for these. Here’s a fun set to try (#Ad)

5. Try snap-in bookmarks and dashboards. This tip is mainly for ring, disc-bound, and spiral-bound planners. Most of these have options for snapping in various plastic or laminated paper items like book marks or dashboards, which are like dividers. Because they can move from planner to planner, they are the perfect place to jot down or stick in some of those constants we keep in our planners. I use mine for lists, reminders, and weekly to dos. Below is one of the many bookmarks and dashboard sets made for the Happy Planner. (#Ad)

6. Have a master planner/notebook. There might be some lists that are simply too much to keep in your planner or just too cumbersome to have to rewrite into a new one. If that’s the case, having a separate master planner, which holds all of your lists (think household chores, budget items, packing lists) is incredibly helpful. You can always refer back to this master planner and add a few to dos or list items into your main planner as needed. I have a ring-bound planner that I use for just this purpose. It has all of my household chores, and I use it to help me set up my monthly chore list.

7. Use the yearly overview pages. Most planners have a section at the beginning of the book with some type of space to write down items for each month of the upcoming year. The Happy Planner has a really comprehensive one. In the 18-month planner, it has three, double-sided layouts and contains each month and a line for each day of the month in vertical columns. This is a great place to keep up with recurring appointments and reminders. I use mine to write in when we change batteries in our smoke detectors or switch out the filters for our air vents. This can easily be transitioned into a new book from year to year. And, if you have a disc-bound planner like Happy Planner, you can pull these pages out and add them to your new planner.

8. Use a 16, 17, or 18-month planner for long-term planning. As I noted above, I’ve written about this before, but I cannot say enough about how helpful it is to have a planner that has more than a year’s worth of room for planning. If you have one of these planners, you likely have written in appointments beyond the date that you will transition over to your new planner. So, as you set up the new one, be sure to check the remaining pages to make sure you move over any appointments or obligations from upcoming months. Although many of those pages will remain blank, it won’t feel like a waste when you have the benefit of using just one planner at a time instead of running around with two so you make sure you keep up with appointments that are further out in the year. That said, if you are truly against buying a planner with extra weekly spreads, you can create your own monthly spreads in the notes section at the back of your planner using stickers or stamps like these. Just be sure to have some lined spaces to write down the dates and information for your appointments. (#Ad)

Review: 2022-2023 Heartland Classic 18-Month Happy Planner

Starting this summer, I will be transitioning out of my beloved Beauty in Florals Happy Planner and into another gorgeous, classic-sized vertical planner: the Heartland Happy Planner. This planner is still on sale at Amazon (#Ad):

I am still finding this size is just right for me (7.75” x 9.75”). As with my previous Happy Planners, this one is also has an arc-disc binding system, which means that I can easily add and remove pages. (They do sell ones with twin o-ring binding, but I find that harder to use for the decorating I do). (For more information on common planner terms, check out this first article I wrote and this second one on decoding basic planner terms.)

As in year’s past, this is a vertical, weekly layout planner, with each day, weekends included, having three vertical boxes and a sidebar for notes. Because it is an 18-month planner, I can do long-term planning as the planner runs from July 2022 to December 2023.

Last year, I went with the Beauty in Florals planner. It not only had a gorgeous floral theme for its cover and dividers, but the pages had a distinctly minimal design. The main benefit, for me, was that it had no design along the spine (the part of the pages that sit within the arc disc binding). I predicted it would provide more options for decorating my pages, and it did not disappoint.

This year, I looked at every possible classic vertical weekly layout, and I found that not a single one had a completely blank spine. Some had a strip of color of some sort, so I did not even consider those. But, even ones with a minimal design all had a black and white design of some sort along the spine. As you can see below, there are three designs in these minimalist planners: small dots and horizontal stripes, which alternate from month to month.

Although I’m not thrilled about having a design on the spine, I am glad that this layout has clean black and white lines and minimal writing. Just like my Beauty in Florals planner, the weekly pages have a dot-grid side bar, which I found made it simple to position stickers. The lack of color on the pages means that I get to chose whatever color scheme I want when decorating. And, the theme of the planner, which focuses on gratitude and positive sayings, more than makes up for the images on the spine.

One main difference between this and last year’s planners is the monthly overview page. First, I will say that the overview is located on the page before the next month’s divider. I really appreciate this feature since I want my divider to turn to the monthly calendar and not the overview page. This overview page is so much more functional than last year’s. In my last planner, nearly a quarter of the monthly overview page had a filled-in header with the year on it. It was a lot of lost space. It then had an awkwardly set up middle space for notes and a bottom section for important dates.

This year, the monthly overview has an entire page of available space for writing. A third of the left side has three vertical boxes. While I would prefer no writing, the suggested Priorities/Goals and Important Dates notations are not that big, and I could probably cover them up with a sticker. The remaining two thirds of the page is a simple dot-grid note page, which is perfect for planning, journaling, or decorating. I think this will be a much more functional use of this space.

Finally, unlike last year’s Beauty in Floral’s planner, which had a corresponding sticker book or my Boho Stargazer from the year before, which had a matching accessories kit, Happy Planner does not make much in the way of Heartland accessories. There is a sticker set, made up of 8 sheets, and a set of 3 arc-disc punched envelopes. So, if you like having a planner with lots of coordinating stickers and accessories, you might want to consider a planner other than the ones with the Heartland design (there was also a 2022 12-month skinny Heartland Happy Planner released earlier).

These are the main differences between my Heartland Happy Planner and last year’s Beauty in Florals. If you’d like more information about 18-month planners, be sure to check out the review I provided in this article.

Are you a mid-year planner launch fan? Do you use a 16, 17, or 18-month planner for long-term planning? Any tips you can share for your setup? Leave a comment below!

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