So its been an interesting few weeks. I could regale you with detailed musings about my interpersonal sagas, or I could jump right in to the crucial stuff…the planner-related stuff. Let’s do that!

When I stare at my planner collection I get goose-bumps, my heart rate increases and I feel an odd sense of joy. However, over the last month or so I’ve agonized over how to set-up my planner life, and find planner peace in 2016. Now 2016 is only three days away.

What to do? How to do it? My planner does not lay flat, I write to large for an A5, do I want horizontal, vertical, do I want separate planners for work and personal life and health and self-actualization? Help!

In 2011, I purchased an E-Reader. After researching the gadget for a couple of months, I settled on Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color. Presently, the Nook sits like an ancient relic buried in the time capsule that is my sweatshirt drawer. However, four years ago, it was my boo. The first hurdle to procuring the elusive Nook was to get to a Barnes & Noble. Being Canadian, that posed a problem. Living close to the Canadian-American Border and thus a one-hour drive to  Upper New York State, not so much. I ended up buying the Nook whilst visiting my Snowbird parents in South Carolina, to the tune of $320 US Dollars. Quite the country you Americans have. Fascinating really. It never fails that I have that moment when I first walk into an American grocery mecca and remember that I can buy a 12-pack of Budlight Strawberitas. In. a. grocery. store. For. ten. dollars. Anyway, I digress.

I nominated my tech genius (I am not exaggerating) husband to solve the mystery of how we could operate the device when we got home in Canada, which would allow me to access the Barnes and Noble e-reader site and purchase my ebooks. After some tense moments, the device sang to life and for the next year or so I spent gads of money downloading titles to my heart’s content. Not only that, I could get the LA Times “delivered” to my Nook every morning?! People magazine every week?! Shape once a month?! How innovative! How current! How useless considering the novelty of reading the LA Times wore off after about two days when it occurred to me that I had never even traveled to LA. I also realized that People magazine interests me not, and Shape was repetitive and uninformative…to me. They are perfectly fine publications, just not for me.

In addition, I missed the feel of the book in my hands. If I attempted to read outside in anything other than overcast weather, an obnoxious glare obstructed my view of that was impossible to fix. I could not lend titles to friends, or donate to libraries, or used book stores and I missed browsing my local bookstore. And I was out of the loop of new releases from Canadian authors. Eventually, the Nook required various upgrades and became frustratingly slow, pretty much unusable. To wrap up this part of the story, I now regularly visit the library, Amazon and the Chapters bookstore that is less than one kilometer from my house and my TBR pile is once again gorgeously towering beside by bed (sad…that I ever deviated in the first place).

Fast forward to March 2015. After battling some health problems wherein I found myself at home a lot, I stumbled upon this online community of planner-lovers. Similar to my foray into e-reading, I had recently started using my smartphone to keep track of my schedule, my health, my wishlists etc. I admittedly had a moment, while staring at photos of planners, where I thought “But, why wouldn’t someone just use their……” Then, the thought quickly translated into this unfamiliar emotion and a racing heart and a buzzing in my brain…..this was clarity. And joy.

Melodramatic? Perhaps. Bizarre? Definitely. Juvenile? Regressive? Absolutely 100% not! What is happening is an inevitable societal shift, a counterculture if you will that actually is not a counter culture at all, but a healthy appreciation of some of the authenticity of my youth. I’ll date myself a bit, but what I’ll tell you is as a youth, Lisa Frank was my idol, practicing handwriting was my jam, sending jazzed-up letters to penpals was my hobby and collecting stickers, yes, stickers was my choice hoarding behaviour. Enter the Erin Condren Life Planner, and I was sold, hooked, enamored.

Over the past six months, I have translated my love for this new hobby into a small business named HighGlowDesigns, a side-hustle that I use to balance the intensity and stress that comes with my day job. I’m slowly telling my friends and family and now want to write about it. Because regardless of whether someone understands my newly reignited interest in some of my youthful obsessions, its an example of finding your passion and letting it be yours.

I look forward to sharing this part of my life with all of you.

Best,

Jenn