My Favorite Paper Planner & How I Use it in My Life and Business

Hey Friend!

Today, we are diving into planning which is not something I often cover on the podcast. We are going to talk about how I use a paper planner in my life and business to keep me organized and increase my productivity as well as creating a keepsake for myself and my children.  

My Choice of Paper Planner for Productivity and as a Keepsake

For the past three or four years, I have been using the Horacio Printing Dream Planner. Luckily for me, I have become friends with the owner and creator of Horacio Printing, Polly Payne, and so was able to get my hands on the 2024 planner a little bit earlier than others. 

I can attest to the incredible quality of this beautiful keepsake planner. It has golden corners to keep them from bending or fraying. My planner from 4 years ago still looks brand new and really holds up for something that I use and have in my hands every single day.

There are two options for this planner. The coil one, which is the one that I have, is the one I love. There is also a bound option which is more of a book-style planner. Both have a little pocket in the front that you can put things in.

The paper is thick and luxurious and the tabs really last. If you want a planner that you can keep and that will be foundational and sustainable in the long run, I cannot recommend more highly the Horacio Printing planners.

Get Your Discounted Paper Planner Now!

I have a special 20% off gift coupon that you can use at checkout to snag your paper planner and any of the other great products available on this site. Go to horacioprinting.com and use the code stef20. Go and get that done. You won’t regret it!

Now that you know a bit more about the planner that I use, let’s talk a little more about how I use it in my life and in my business.

What Is a Paper Planner?

A paper planner is simply the planner that you use to organize your life and business. I use one planner for both my life and my business. I believe that I am one cohesive person and I have a business as well as a life outside of my business and I need one place where I can manage all of these things. 

My paper planner is a space that I use not just as a scheduling tool but also where I collect my dreams. It is the place where I create an annual vision board for my company. I write my annual praise report in this planner. It is the place where I put in my miracle moments that happen every single month. More than simply a planner, it is a capsule of a year of my life. I save it so that I can go back and look at what was going on in my life in that year.

This capsule gives me a chance to look back and see what my praise report was for that year and what my goals were. It is such an amazing, beautiful way to see my year in a snapshot in one cohesive spot. And this is important to me which means that my planner needs to be high quality. It needs to encompass the fact that I want all these different pieces of my life in one place. It cannot just be a scheduling tool, as I have said, but needs to be something that can be a keepsake for me and for my family and my kids in the future.

Using My Planner for Praise and Productivity

Looking Back With Praise and Thanksgiving

At my CEO retreat that I attend with Polly and my other friend, Chelsi, as well as some of our team, we take time to think about what has happened over the past year. From this, I create my praise report for that year. I write this report on the first sheet of my planner. The dream planner I use has a blank sheet which is perfect for this. I write out every single thing that happened in, for example 2023, that was a praise report.

For my business, this might include revenue goals or download goals. In my personal life, this might be health goals, marriage goals, parenting goals or trips we have taken. It is really all those things that happened that were of God or were amazing in that year.

Looking Forward and Setting Goals

Now that I am in this headspace of looking at how much God has moved in the past year, I create a vision board for the following year, an actual visual within the planner. Like we used to do in college where we cut clippings from magazines, I do something similar but this is more of an adult version. I create words in Canva, I write out scriptures in pretty fonts and I print them out. I put some family photos in here with beautiful stickers. In the end, I have a double-sided vision board of my goals for the year ahead.

This way, in my planner I now have the praise report from the prior year and I also have the vision and goal board for the next year. I can keep my planner and move into the new year beautifully with a snapshot in time of what my dreams and wishes were and how God had spoken to me about the things that were coming and then what actually happened.

Using the Planner to See God’s Work in My Life

What is so crazy is that when I look back in my planner from four years ago at my dreams and desires and wishes and God-breathed goals, so many of them have been done. Not all of them have come to fruition but when it comes to these, I praise God for the ones that maybe weren’t supposed to happen. When you do this, it is amazing to look back and see just how far you have come.

Using My Paper Planner to Create Possibility

Setting up My Practical Bucket List

The next thing I do is set up my bucket list for the year ahead. The Horacio planner already has a beautiful dream planning section set up so you are able to write up your bucket list right there for the next year. For me, this includes financial, business, home, marriage, motherhood, health, spiritual, personal and my top goals. In this space, I write out the things that I have visually created on my vision board. Because I am a goal setter, I love to know if I have hit the goals that I set out to hit that year.

Setting up My Spiritual Goals

Under the dream planning section, you have the chance to do a lot of the internal auditing process. This includes more around what you want to become, declaration statements, encouragement, how to refocus. This might include doing some work around what you need to shift in your prioritization. It might include generosity planning. It is more of a focus on the spiritual side of your life.

By using the planner in this way, you are setting yourself up to be very clear on the goals and dreams that you have for the next year. This is an imperative piece of the planning process. If you do not speak life into the God-breathed dreams that He has for you and your business and your marriage and your motherhood and your giving and your health, you are missing something.

From Ideation to Reality Using a Paper Planner

I do not believe that we operate at our fullest capacity until we are leaning into the possibilities that God has for us. By doing this process, I am realistically pushing myself so that I can really rise into my own Kingdom capacity. I do not believe that God wants us to play small. I believe that He wants us to do incredible things that are fulfilling, that better the Kingdom of the Lord, that help people, that are inspiring and motivating, that we treat our body like a temple of the Lord, that we work towards oneness in our marriage, that we practice patience and grace in our parenting.

This all takes work and it takes internal goal setting and planning. Your planner is the place where you write it all so that it can become a reality in your brain. And so that the connection between your heart and your head and the Holy Spirit can take place and you can start taking action to become this person that God is speaking life over.

Using the Paper Planner for Scheduling and Productivity

Mapping Out Scheduled Events

Now that I have done all of this pre-work for the year ahead, I go into the planner and add all the scheduled events for the upcoming year. There is a monthly screenshot view in the planner so I put in here anything that I know to be true already. This includes birthdays and anniversaries, sporting events, back to school dates as well as when school is not open and the holidays. Everything that I am already aware of for the year gets put in now.

Once I have done this, I can now go and put in my time blocks on a week-to-week basis. I use Chelsi Jo’s operating system to run my business. If you want to start systemizing your business in this way, I highly recommend it. You can find out more about this at stefaniegass.com/sybcj.

The Balancing Act That My Paper Planner Helps Me Manage

In my paper planner, at a glance, I need to see the beautiful balance between my life and my business. So, in it I will color my time blocks. I use highlighters to color out these blocks which is super simple!

Time Blocking for Productivity and Simplicity

Time With God

As an example of a time block, all the way across my morning it says ‘God’ because I am doing my morning time with the Lord before my day begins. This is part of my morning routine and it is a fundamental need for me. Spending time with God is a must. It is a non-negotiable. I try to do it every single day. I don’t always do this because I am a human being with a snooze button. But I try my best.

Kids’ Morning Routine and Work Block

Then we have the kids’ morning routine. Part of my morning routine is waking the kids up, sorting out their breakfast, their backpacks and their lunches, and then between me or Brad, somebody takes them to school. When I get home, I begin my work block which is typically Monday through Friday from 9:30 in the morning until three o’clock with a one-hour lunch break. This block is green and that is when I work.

After School Routine

Then I have an after-school routine which is blue. This is where we pick up the kids, make them a snack, and we do chores or homework or piano practice. This block is about an hour and a half. After this, I have a workout block, which is yellow because it is also a fundamental need for me. This workout block is about an hour long. We then have dinner and any other evening thing that we have to do, like maybe there is a sports practice to attend or my husband has a game of some kind.

Make Sure Your Fundamental Blocks Are There!

On the weekends, I note any birthday parties or church or whatever else might be happening so that when I open my paper planner, I can see what my life looks like. What are my priorities? There needs to be enough yellow on the paper because I need time with God. I need my workouts. Time with my friends is important to me. I need a date night once in a while.

These are all yellow. They are fundamental. I need to see when I am unavailable for work because I’m spending time with my kids or my husband. And I need to know my green blocks which are my work blocks so that I know how many hours I have available to spend on my company.

The Compass of My Week

When I finish mapping those color blocks out in my planner, I head over to my operating system which you can find at stefaniegass.com/sybcj. This is where I go to see what am I working on or who I am meeting with. This system holds all of those scheduled events.

I don’t want every single thing happening in my company to be on my paper planner. I want my paper planner to be the compass of my week. It leads me from my morning routine into my work block and then I can move into my computer to actually do the work.  

Monthly Praise in My Paper Planner

At the end of every month, I take a few hours and I write in my praise report for that month. This helps me to create my master praise report list at the end of the year otherwise I will forget. I know that there is a scripture that talks about really reveling in what God has already done. We are so often looking forward. We are focusing on what is next. But what about what has been done? That is what a praise report does. It has you stop, be still and look at the blessings and the beauty of what God has done and how he has moved in the last 30 days.

I write anything for me that comes up as a praise report. I will look back at my calendar to trigger my memory and I’ll look back at my weeks to see what has happened. Sometimes it is just the smallest, beautiful thing that God has blessed me with. An example of this is one time when my son and I were hiking. He said to me ‘Mama, I see hundreds of angels.’ I looked over and there were hundreds of white sparkling butterflies and he told me that the angels were right there by the butterflies. This was written in my praise report because butterflies have always been a representation of the presence of the Lord for me. For God to symbolize that with my son and show him angels was such an incredible gift.

I might write down that I have had the highest download month ever. That is a praise item. It can be anything that comes up for me spiritually or emotionally or regarding my business or financially or a breakthrough in my marriage or parenting or friendship. I am not afraid of writing too many praises in my planner because it is such a blessing at the end of the year to go back and revisit them.

Once I have looked back at the previous month, I start to map out the next month.

Quarterly Evaluations to Make Sure You Are on Track

In the Horacio planner, you have a chance to do some monthly recap work. Every quarter you can go back through and do an evaluation. You can look at your personal growth, do a 90-day goal check in and look at your generosity planning amongst other things.

Which Paper Planner Are You Going to Use for 2024?

If this sounds like something you want to use to create a time capsule, a compass of what your business and your life should seamlessly look like, I highly recommend that you use the planners from Horacio Printing and don’t forget to use the code stef20 to get your 20% discount. They have a quiz on the home page for you to find out which planner is right for you. I pray that this planner blesses you as much as it has blessed me.

Also, come on over into our Facebook community and tell us which planner you have chosen to create productivity and that keepsake that you can look back on in years to come. You can find us at stefgasscommunity.com. I will see you over there.

I pray this blesses you!

Xo,

Stef

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