#PocketPlannerMagic: How to fit colouring books in your planner

Want to up the cute and useful factor of your pocket planner? Tip 1: Get your colouring books in there. Here’s how.

Haven’t planners and bullet journals become a huge thing? Maybe it’s because we’re realising that we like making things pretty more than we like the instant ease of saving a memo to our phones. Or maybe it’s because we can’t forget to recharge our planners, ending up stuck without important information. Some people like to use their journals to chill, or organise, or anything at all.

I have a planner. It’s this red Filofax pocket-sized one I’ve had for donkey’s years and, more often than not, it doesn’t have the right year’s pages.

So how can you make your planner a useful thing to lug around, especially in summer?

Firstly, you’ll need a planner. You might have one lurking around that you bought in a fit of enthusiasm, or maybe yours is already an extra limb. Lots of bloggers and websites have already written everything you could need to know about choosing a planner you’d like.

At the moment, I want to focus on making my planner solve a small dilemma I had a few weeks ago. I went on holiday for a weekend, a very minimalist holiday. The kind with one small bag, only the clothes I really needed and no room for anything I wouldn’t actually use. Whilst I like to colour in the evenings, there was no way I could take my favourite colouring books, all the pencils and sharpeners and associated bits with me.

But what I could have done, I realised as I looked at my little planner, is cut a few pictures down to size. And so that’s what I’ve done this week. If you like colouring, or want to try it, this might be a fun and simple project for you.

How to fit a colouring book into your planner

You will need:

• A piece of stiff card
• pencil
• scissors
• hole-punch (you might have one lurking somewhere)

Has your planner got a card or plastic ‘page’ you can use? If not, just take a normal page and draw around it to make a sturdier template. Cut this out and, bingo, you have a way to make anything planner-sized.

I started with some colouring books I wasn’t overly keen on. I’d never cut up my favourites, but I do have a couple of repeating pattern style ones that don’t mean too much to me. The plus side of using an existing colouring book is that the paper is often better quality than the stuff in your printer. As a result, you can easily have images on both sides.

You could, of course, look online for colouring pages, or scan in some you don’t want to cut up. That way you can size them as you need and shrink a whole image down without having to choose a part of it. Search online and you’ll find many free printable colouring pages.

Using a page from your planner as a guide, draw where your holes need to be on your card template. Punch them out with your hole-punch, and use that to punch your picture pages. Now you can load them up into your planner.

Where to put them? Well, you can stick them all at the back, together. You could use them to divide months or sections, or scatter them at random through your planner.

All you need now is to decide if you want to stick a packet of colours in your bag (I have a small case of fine-liners in mine right now) or if you want to take a minimalist route and stick one colour at a time with your planner, changing every few days.

Now my planner is ready to go for pleasure, not just business!