How to Use Your Panda Planner for Results

April 8, 2023 Heidi Lumpkin

Don’t you just love getting a new planner? So much possibility - so much promise - so much opportunity to fill those blank pages with tasks and to-do’s, organizing the facets of your life.

All a planner really does is help you to implement a framework, a system - an approach that lets you parse your life into manageable pieces. A planner helps you to lasso pieces of time, wrangling them into defined spaces where productivity can flourish.

That’s all good. Funny thing is - even a blank piece of paper can be a planner. So a planner itself helps you to skip the step of how to organize your tasks, projects, lists, and goals.

It’s important to do your research when it comes to committing to a planning system - and to continue experimenting and refining how you use it.

How using a panda planner helps

Where the Panda Planner really shines is its ability to help you nourish and grow positive life habits, in addition to supporting you in your time management of those daily/weekly/monthly tasks and projects.

How does the Panda Planner (no matter which version you have) help you do this?

By creating several defined spaces with writing prompts in your daily and/or weekly pages to track those habits.

And in that way, the Panda Planner is really more of a brain training system in addition to a planner.

The Panda Planner Daily (blue, please) is the one I started with - it’s smaller than your full-page layout and offers monthly and weekly sections which are great to have a bigger-picture view of your time and your goals.

You can also pick up and start with this planner at any point in the year - it’s undated. Which means it’s awesome.

No more waiting until January 1 to implement that goal to get organized or buying a yearly planner with months already unusable.

After experimenting and refining my own process, I did move over to the Panda Planner Via - I love the letter-size book with Project sections - and areas in the book to flesh out those projects so you can schedule tasks and continually move things forward.

But how do you know the Panda Planner is right for you?

There are so many new and great planners out there. And most planning systems will work if you work them.

But you’ll know if the Panda Planner is for you if:

You’re new to a planner and organization system or you’re not quite feeling it with your current system.
You’re looking to keep yourself accountable.
You’re looking to build specific positive habits (specifically, a meditation/mindfulness practice, an exercise habit, gratitude practice, or optimism) into your routine.

Remember above when I said any system works if you work it? That is the key - working the system.

Spending at least 10 minutes in the morning as a routine utilizing that space in your Planner to lay out your day, capture your gratitude, and write down an affirmation or confidence mantra (this book has a year’s worth of great ones).

And magnify the power of these new habits by building upon the practice each day.

Panda also makes this AMAZING poster that helps you track by weeks. It reminds me of the habit-building approach called ‘Don’t break the chain’ (Jerry Seinfeld is known for using this early in his career to write) - at its core, daily marking of habit-doing in and of itself is a motivator.

The poster provides a constant - large - visual piece of motivation. Once you start marking workday progress, you’re not going to want to ‘break the chain’ and will keep going as you gauge your daily progress within the year.

How do I know the Panda Planner is right for me?

It’s not for everyone. But if you’re not looking to build positive habits (who isn’t?), or if daily affirmations are not your thing...I get it. It’s just important to know that going in.

Some aspects of this planner won’t appeal to everyone, and although you can track any new habit with this planner, there are so many other planning systems available that might be a better fit. (You may want to check out a more straightforward system like the no-frills Artfan.)

Panda Planner Hacks for ideas and tasks

One additional piece of my workflow that has been really useful in my organizational practice is adding these large tabbed sticky notes as thought-capture areas.

I use one note and color for admin tasks and keep a running list. At the end of each week if there are tasks left on the list (I make it a habit of scheduling these out as I go) allows me to capture all those little pieces that float through my head at any point of the day.

I use another note and color to capture ideas (hello, Strengthsfinder top result of Ideation...I need somewhere to put all those ideas!) - again, getting them out of my brain onto the paper.

Writing the ideas down doesn’t mean I’ll act on any of them soon, but I can then look at those notes, schedule items from them, and carry the notes forward as I turn planner pages.

The key to how to use the Panda Planner (or any planner)

Because it is a system approach, Panda Planner publishes excellent videos on how to get started. And they are great...for getting started.

But after watching those videos, my answer to how to use a Panda Planner?

By using it. Circular answer, I know. But really, it’s the answer.

The Panda Planner can be a habit-building powerhouse.

But only if you can sit down at your workspace every morning and spend the extra ten minutes to get your mind right and build those habits.

And then spending five minutes in the evening - the ‘evening routine’ allows you to recap these pieces - much like what we do in our confidence-building practice of The Three Things. And then thinking positively about getting better tomorrow.

Give Panda a try.

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