Welcome back! It's good to see you again. Please note that I am now publishing all new material at my hub site: In Context Blog

While checking in at 43folders today, I came across this post about looking for the perfect planner. In the comments were some real gems, so I’d like to share some pr0n with you:

From Germany, the x47 leather-bound planner. Holy smokes! What a great idea for binding the cahier-style booklets into the beautiful leather folder.

More from Germany, with another binding system - myx17. This one uses rubber bands to hold the booklets in the folder. I do not think that this would be as sturdy.What do you think? Did anyone get something neat for Christmas?

I have just completed a project that I have been working on for a couple of days, which I call the Book of Days. Click on the pics to go to Flickr for the full-sized images.

The Book of Days is a five-year journal. There is one page for each day of the year, with room for five entries - one per year from 2008 to 2012.

I made this set of three books from blank 5″ x 7″ journals from Barnes & Noble. The customized covers were created by printing a “perpetual calendar” image I found online onto parchment paper. This paper was glued to a 5″ x 7″ piece of cardboard, this cardboard backing was in turn glued to the kraft cover of the journal.

That was actually the easy part of this project, luckily I am pretty “crafty”. The time-consuming part was laying out the pages and creating the table of contents.

Each Month is in Three Sections

This is the Table of Contents for Volume I:

Introduction
Table of Contents

January Goals
Daily Entries
Monthly Review

February Goals
Daily Entries
Monthly Review

March Goals
Daily Entries
Monthly Review

Quarterly Reviews
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012

April Goals
Daily Entries
Monthly Review

May Goals
Daily Entries
Monthly Review

June Goals
Daily Entries
Monthly Review

Goal Setting

Each section begins with a page set aside for writing down my Goals for the month.

These goals will include both personal and professional subjects. I believe that it will be interesting and instructive to be able to look at what my goals for each month were as the years go by.

In fact that feature is, for me, the greatest appeal of this type of journal. I do keep a journal that I write in most days, mainly a collection of ideas, free-associations and rambling thoughts, not so much a record of anything. This journal is also difficult to use as a reference due to its free-form nature.

Daily Entries

In contrast, this journal is designed to become an ongoing record of my personal development, with tags and pointers to other resources. Each day gets 4 lines per year, where I will record brief notes on the weather, work projects, current events, and a general impression of the day.

For example I may make a note of an interesting blog post or book that I read, with a “link” to a quotation in the Commonplace Book, or a website, or a notation that identifies a file in the archive where I put the printed article.

The Monthly Review

The third part of each monthly section is a spot for a summary of the Monthly Review. One full page is set aside for each year. Over the course of the past year, as my GTD practice has grown and evolved, I have found that a summary of this kind would come in handy for the Quarterly Review.

Likewise, at the end of March, there is a section set aside for a Quarterly Summary. This summary will focus on progress made toward long-term goals and larger-scale projects.

As the journals only have 240 pages, I had to break the Book of Days into three volumes. The second contains the entries from July out to November, and the Quarterly Reviews for June and September.

Volume III will be the record for the December daily entries, the final set of Quarterly Reviews, and the Annual Review Summary. I will be including an Annual summary for 2007, as there is plenty of room and I am eager to get started.

Fresh Focus on Productivity has an interesting take on a similar idea, the Completion Journal. Check it out. (And if making your own is too much of a hassle, you can get a spiral-bound version here - the Book of Days on lulu)

“Now today, moment by moment,realize that each person and event thathappens is life for you.  Life is not somewhere else. See how fully you can accept the lifethat presents itself to you now.”

~ Brenda Shoshanna

Today’s guest post is from Mike St. Pierre of The Daily Saint.

How often to you check your email?  If you work in a techcentric environment, this question may seem odd as email becomes akin to breathing, an unconscious act that continues throughout the day.  I’d like to suggest that there is a pleasure to email that overchecking can dullen.  Read on.

Email can be pleasurable when it’s surprising, when it delivers an anticipated response or when it relaxes the reader.  Unfortunately, when we check email over and over again, our sense of email pleasure softens, making email another mundane task that takes up our time.

Today’s GTD Insight is very simple- check email several times during the day but don’t overcheck.  The GTD practitioner knows how to strike the balance between getting his work done and still enjoying the little things, like a piece of good news delivered via email.