How to customise your pocket planner with a portable hobby

customising pocket planner hobby

Set your creativity free. Here’s how to fit your hobbies into a pocket planner with a bit of love and DIY.

Road trips are great. In a car or on a coach, travelling across miles of land with nothing but your mp3 player, your phone and… wait, you did charge that mp3 player, right? And what do you mean ‘this coach has no wifi’?

Good job your planner fits in your bag, right?

I firmly believe that there is nothing you cannot do if you take a creative approach to it. And this includes transforming your everyday habits and unusual hobbies into a planner-friendly, teeny-tiny package.

If art is your jam, your work is done.

You’ve got your colouring pages and a few blank sheets of paper, a packet of crayons or a trusty fine liner, right? Maybe you can note down a few quick hints for inspiration. Try ‘draw the person on your left’ or ‘the last thing you ate’ or maybe ‘what you would look like as a unicorn’.

Don’t forget my tutorial on how to fit colouring books into your portable planner, too.

Are you a stitchy-witch who loves embroidery?

Pick a small design you can do in one colour, a planner-sized piece of canvas or binca and while away the hours making a punky patch for your bag or jacket. Don’t forget your needle and thread; pop them in a card holder section or carefully in your pocket.

Modern day Taliesin?

You’ll have plenty to write about as you speed past service stations and pause to contemplate the pace of modern life in your third traffic jam.

Believe dance is life?

Short of doing the backseat boogie, you can always note down some choreography to try later when you get bored of playing ‘I spy something beginning with c’.

It’s always car. Unless it’s cow.

Twitcher? Aeroplane enthusiast? Flaneur? Collector of unusual place names?

Have a page in the planner devoted to your observations. As a child I used to collect pub names on long journeys so that I could create monsters with them. I ended up with a lot of arms, the occasional head and not much else…

Fan of paper games?

Great, you have paper. But if you’re bored of noughts and crosses, why not try one of its ancestors? Look up the rules to games like Nim, Three Men’s Morris or Fox and Geese. You’ll need counters, but coins, stamps or scraps of paper make handy substitutes.

These games were what people played before the pencil was popular, and are still great fun now. They were so popular that boards have been found carved into the tops of pews in old churches, with people bringing their own counters to entertain themselves through the long sermons.

Honestly, I think if you stare at your planner long enough you’ll soon start to realise there are all sorts of things that will fit in it with the aid of your trusty scissors and a hole punch…

Customizing your planner to include portable hobbies is just one more way to end up with a trusty companion that’s everything you deserve.