When I started blogging it was just something to do in my spare time to motivate me to get to the gym and to keep making the effort to eat healthily. It was a hobby that I hoped would connect me with other girls who were also trying to get fitter, healthier and improve their bodies. Here we are, two years later and now thousands of you visit this little blog every month, check in with me on social media, subscribe to my emails and I’ve even been nominated for ‘Best in Fitness’ in the Cosmo Blog Awards!. Things round here are starting to get a bit more serious. I needed a plan, enter the Dailygreatness Business Planner*.
Earlier this year I started blogging more intentionally, rather than posting whatever I felt like whenever I had a spare moment. This resulted in what I hope, are more useful posts like 5 Reasons Why Women Should Lift Weights and How to Meal Plan for Beginners and How To Choose a Workout Plan That’s Perfect for You. I finally felt like I was in a good place with my blog but I needed guidance. Luckily there was the perfect tool for me, a glorious, beautifully designed, yellow journal. I absolutely adore beautiful notebooks and this has taken my stationary obsession to an all new high.
What is it?
The Dailygreatness Business Planner is packed full of prompts, tips, checklists, questions and affirmations to get you thinking seriously and positively about your goals and putting plans in place to action those goals. My blog is by no means a business and yet the Dailygreatness Business Planner has been super helpful. The tagline is ‘An Actionable Plan for Expanding Your Mind & Exploding Your Business’ and that’s exactly what it’s enabled me to do. It has allowed me to ‘think big’ for this online space of mine and I hope it will help me to explode the growth of my blog, but time will tell on that one.
What’s in it?
The beginning of the planner explains the different sections which I’ve found very helpful as I’d never written a one-page business plan before, or a business model canvas. If you’re not sure what these things are, don’t worry, the planner explains it all. After that you write down your goals and the planner ensures you make them SMART goals. I loved filling in the Business Vision Planner and thinking of where I want to be in one, three, five and ten years time. I’d never done that before, not in my career, not in my personal life and certainly not for my blog, so it was great to put pen to paper and not be afraid to dream big. I wrote down my visions without the fear of ‘what if I don’t achieve that’ or ‘I can’t do that’ because no one else needs to read what’s in my planner except for me, so if I don’t achieve it, so what? No one else will know that I haven’t met a goal so I dreamt big and I wrote it down.
The planner has Quarterly Business Goal Planners which help you to write down projects and action steps to achieve your big yearly goals. Breaking down your big goal into smaller, quarterly goals is SO helpful and makes your big goal seem less scary. The planner then becomes a weekly planner and journal of sorts, with a Weekly Priority Planner, a Weekly Action Planner, a Weekly Calendar/Journal and a Weekly Check-in. At first, I thought this was a lot of writing to do on a weekly basis but now I think this is the perfect system. It gets you to think about your priorities and divide them into urgent, important, waiting on, delegate, decisions and next week. Next up it’s the action planner where you write down and projects, appointments, tasks and actions. I use this to remind myself of any blog events, photos I need to take, props or ingredients I need to buy etc.
After that it is the Weekly Calendar which gives a different focus each week, such as ‘My top 3 actions today’ and ‘My 3 most important tasks today’. At the top of the calendar are mindful prompts such as ‘Today I am going to enjoy…’ and ‘Today I am focusing on being…’. Work can be stressful and blogging in your spare time can be super stressful, especially when you have brands chasing you for posts and an overflowing inbox, but you leave the office of your full-time job late and the trains home are delayed and you still need to find time to gym, cook, eat, shower and still have some kind of an evening to yourself. I’ve found having these positive prompts to be really calming in those stressful times and they have helped me to look at the positives.
Finally we have the weekly check-in where we review how the week has gone. There are questions such as ‘What was great about this week?’ and ‘What challenged me this week that I can grow from?’. These questions are great whether you have a blog, your own business or you work for someone else. They can even be applied to your personal life to help us continuously grow and strive to be better. Each week the mindful prompts in the calendar and the review questions in the weekly check-in change, so there’s no way you can get bored of filling in the same things every week. I love that about the planner as it constantly inspires you to grow and to think of all angles of your blog or business.
How do I use it?
I keep the Dailygreatness Business Planner on my bedside table and fill it in on a Sunday evening to plan out my week ahead and review the previous week. I must admit, I haven’t always filled it out each Sunday, as you can probably tell from the lack of blog posts this month. Life and work got a bit manic and my blog had to temporarily take a backseat, but I’m back to blogging and back to using my Business Planner. It feels great to put my thoughts and intentions down on paper on a Sunday evening and makes Mondays seem not-so-bad. I’m really loving being more mindful and doing things with intention now, rather than winging it and hoping for the best. This sort of approach can be applied to so many areas of my life, from my personal life to my health and wellbeing. I’m already eyeing up the Dailygreatness Training Journal and the original Dailygreatness Journal. I just don’t want to overwhelm myself with too many journals and not enough time to fill them in. Baby steps. I’ve been filling in the Dailygreatness Business Planner for over a month now and I’m super proud of that, considering my FiloFax didn’t last long.
What are the pros and cons?
I’ve raved about the planner throughout this post so I’ll keep this brief; it’s beautiful, it thinks of everything to get you to think big and grow your business or blog, the affirmations and prompts are positive and lovely, it’s beautifully designed and laid out.
The cons? It’s a chunky monkey, this isn’t a book you can carry around in your handbag everyday to whip out whenever an idea strikes you. It’s best to note that idea down on your iPhone or a smaller notebook and write it down in your DGBP once you’re back home. Also, it takes commitment to write in this every week and/or every day, but business takes commitment so you know, commitment-phobes need not apply.
Overall, I love the Dailygreatness Business Planner and how it’s opened my mind to thinking big about my blog with the different goal-setting sections and prompts and affirmations. Once I’ve finished the Business Planner, or at least got a big chunk of the way through it, I’ll definitely want to add another Dailygreatness journal to my collection. Do you own either the original or the training journal? If so, let me know what you think of them and which one you think I should get.
Now it’s over to you, are you a blogger? A business owner? Someone who would love to be a blog or business owner? What tools do you currently use to make plans for your blog or business? Do you love stationery, notebooks and journals as much as me? Let me know in the comments below.
The Dailygreatness Business Planner was gifted to me as a PR sample. My opinions, thoughts and love for this planner are entirely my own, that is my promise to you.
