Happiness is Scrappy: Happie Add-Ons To My Planner

Hello, it is Wan back on the blog, and today, I am going to share with you how I deal with busy months that require more planning space than is available in my planner.

I don’t know about you, but November and December tend to be really busy months for me. I have to start Christmas preparations (buying presents, etc) early because we have family living far away and we all know about those pesky postal delays that occur during the holiday season, don’t we? So, in order to have a buffer against such delays, I like to start sending presents off in the later half of November, which means I start getting busy with Christmas preparations from early November. In addition, I also start looking into places that do Christmas dinners during the latter two weeks of November because we host Christmas for my side of the family in Singapore, and we tend to buy in, rather than cook. All these extra activities need to be written down and tracked somewhere (with my leaky memory these days) and with my daily planner being maximally utilized even without these extra areas to co-ordinate, I had to get a little creative. Now, I have to say upfront that I don’t do all of my Christmas/extra planning in my daily planner (that is housed in a separate fauxdori insert that acts as Christmas preparation central), but I do need some extra space in my daily planner for some areas of Christmas planning. This is where the unpunched A5 inserts from Happie Scrappie come into great use.

First, I want a place to track presents for everyone, so I chose a grid style page and laid down some washi to make three separate columns.

I then used some of the stickers included in the kit for the headings. My three headings are “Names/Ideas” (for the person I am buying for and any ideas I have for their presents), “Budget” (the amount set aside for them) and “Actual” (the actual amount spent).

Once that is done, I used the magnetic clip to attach it in my Happy Planner (which is my daily planner). I chose this way of securing the page (rather than a more permanent way) because when I go Christmas shopping, I like to take this with me in the fauxdori insert which is Christmas preparation central, and thus, just loosely securing it this way makes it easier to move the page between the two planners. (As a side note, while I try and keep things as authentic as possible by showing pictures of pages that I have actually used, I have deliberately chosen to show a picture of an empty page with just the relevant headings in this case because some of my family follow what I do, and I don’t want them to know what I have actually budgeted/spent on their presents, so I apologise for the less than realistic pic. I assure you that it is currently all filled in in the planner.).

The second page I created/used was actually inspired by the Happie Scrappie insert page itself (this is one of the great things about the Happie Scrappie inserts, they are all designed so well that it is often apparent what you should use them for). I have tasks that I perform regularly that I still sometimes write in my planner (because, as I have said, I have a leaky memory) and one of the insert pages included in this month’s kit is designed to be a tracking insert. That being the case, I moved all my regular tasks to the insert page, which freed up room in my daily planner for the extra Christmas activities that I need reminders for (for example, pick up Cold Storage Christmas brochure, etc).

I also took advantage of the little grid style area at the bottom of the page to highlight the tasks that HAD to be completed that week. With it being such a busy time, I found this to be extremely useful in ensuring that time sensitive tasks were not missed and thus, duly completed.

The page is then attached to the Happy Planner with a piece of washi tape (the same one I used in the layout that week to keep the look coordinated).

That way, I get to keep everything I need in my daily planning all in one place, and there is also the added advantage that the insert has extra space for anything else that I might want to track/plan in the week (it helps that the second side of this insert also features a grid style page which functions very well as note paper). And just so you get a clear idea of how the page looks in my Happy Planner, here is a pic.

So there you have it, a way to ensure that your planner can stretch to cover those busy times when you need more planning space. And that is it from me for today. If you do adopt this method of ‘expanding’ your planner, do tag us on IG or post in our Facebook group, because we would love to see it. Have a great day and Happie planning!

~ Wan

Things that I used in this blog post.