This week was my first week back from almost 7 weeks away in Europe. Since the whole week would be nothing but lists and crossing things off a to do list, I didn’t even bother with a weekly spread, I just used lists the entire week. I categorised the things I needed to do then grabbed some Happy Notes refill pages.

Life admin
Blog & Shop to do list
Photo book setup
Black Friday Wish List

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Life Admin

For my life admin I did a big brain dump of everything from the minor things like unpacking to the bigger things that are due soon or which popped up while I was away and had to deal with once I got back. Since I wanted this to be a brain dump (i.e. a fast list) I opted for an already colorful Happy Planner insert (this list one). That way I could just use black pen and the page would still look pretty.

I like to coordinate the colors of the stationery I’m using each week, with the colors of the planner. Looking at these colors I immediately thought of the Stabilo Boss highlighters. So I opted for black pen and then highlighting when done instead of a checklist.

What a difference highlighter makes!

The Happy Planner paper is thick – no ghosting or bleed through on the back side of the page. Depending how hard you press with your pen there may be some small indenting:

Blog & Shop to do List

I got back to Australia at the end of a month which meant I could incorporate monthly planning with this weeks spread. I always do a monthly checklist but since it looks almost the same every month (not many ways you can do a checklist differently… ) I never post it here on the blog.

I always use either my Happy Notes or ARC notebook so I can remove and rearrange the page with whatever weekly spread I’m using that week. Or if I’m using a planner made by someone else e.g. coil bound, sewn bound etc, I can remove the page and keep it out with that planner.

I used the MAMBI checklist stamp rather than hand-drawing checkboxes.

After I did the brain dump I added numbers to the left of the checkbox for the week within the month that I planned to do that task.

Blog Planning

I knew I wouldn’t have much time to write blog posts when I got back so I had some already drafted before I left and published those, so didn’t need any blog post planning pages this week. If I did, I’d probably have used a MAMBI half sheet weekly spread like this one or this one that I used for this spread.

Photo book

I make photo books of my trips and like to get started sorting photos right after I get back! I was going to use the teacher attendance / report card insert from Happy Planner but the space wasn’t long enough to write my tasks and I only needed 12 columns (1 for each country I visited).

So I made this printable (click here to download a copy) in 5 minutes in Photoshop (here are my tutorials if you want to learn how to make your own).

When I printed I just chose custom page size and entered the Happy Planner dimensions then trimmed the page and added to my Happy Notes.

See this post for a tutorial / screenshots of what settings to select in your printer.

I’ll be doing an entire post on how I plan and make travel photobooks make sure you subscribe to be notified when that post is published.

Since I needed 12 colors and I wanted to try my new ParKoo erasable pens, I used a mix of the Frixion erasable and the Parkoo erasable (as each brand doesn’t have 12 rainbow colors).

Wish List

I made this printable which you can download for free here. If you’re an existing subscriber you can login to the printables library here. I record the lowest price I’ve seen (thanks to a website I use called Price Hipster). Then I know if it’s actually on sale / a good deal on Black Friday, Boxing Day sales etc.

The printable is editable (type your text before printing) but I decided to print a copy and just add to it with pen as I found new things to buy.

I resized the tutorial to fit the Classic Happy Planner. See this post for a quick tutorial on how to do this.