My 2022 Work Planner

Now I don’t usually use a planner for work because I use the calendar on Outlook as nearly all of the appointments and deadlines are not actually mine but that of any of my 4 bosses and it’s easier to share those with any or all of them with the Outlook calendar.

Now after the crazy last two years we’ve had when I have spent almost 15 months out of the 24 working from home I have discovered that my time in front of the computer screen has increased dramatically and that’s mainly because there are certain things that I used to do when I was in the office that took me away from the computer that I can no longer do and home and have to rely on our skeleton crew that is physically in the office.

Another thing that I had in the office that I didn’t have at home was a desk calendar – at home, my “desk” calendar is actually the wallpaper on my second monitor. My desk calendar at work was used for recording down when any of my bosses were on leave, when any of my 3 work buddies were on leave (I would need to help cover their work when they were gone), holidays, office closures and certain office deadlines or appointments.

Towards the end of last year, I found my constantly switching from my inbox view to my calendar view to check if someone from my team was on leave or not. In my office, there is a usually a lot of people taking leave in the last two months of the year because of the holidays and also because we are required to clear a certain number of days of our annual leave or we forfeit them.

Out of frustration, I grabbed a spare notebook and created a little work planner. I kept it simple with just having a 5-day week on a page layout and everything that I would have put on my desk calendar was written down there. As I now didn’t have to keep switching my Outlook view, I found whatever stress or anxiety I was having would ease off. It actually helps because I get quite a number of emails throughout the day as well as being copied in on all of the emails my main boss receives so I do need to be top of it otherwise it will “flood”.

In December of last year it was announced that our office would be returning to the alternate week rotation, which basically means half the office will be physically in the office while the other half is working from home and then it switches each week. Given that, I decided to get a planner that I could bring to and from the office on a weekly basis so that I’d never be without my desk calendar again haha. A bit dramatic I know but hey it is what it is and anything to reduce my anxiety levels.

I had originally ordered this planner to use as my daily/memory planner but then my plans for that changed so given that I hadn’t gotten a work planner yet and the layout in this one would work perfectly for what I needed it for, it became my work planner.

This planner is a custom designed planner from Personal Planner. You can customize the size of your planner, the cover, the layout inside and even the colours used in it. I picked the A5 size which I love because it’s small enough to be portable but big enough to hold all the information I need.