How to get Focused with Erin Condren’s New Focus Collection

There are so many apps and digital planner options now, that it can be hard to keep focused, which is why a physical planner like Erin Condren’s Focus Collection might just be the perfect solution for you! In today’s world it’s not uncommon to use multiple calendars, schedulers, communication tools, and reminder apps, making us feel dizzy and overwhelmed instead of organized and focused!

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If you’re having a hard time keeping track of tasks and focusing on what’s the priority, both work and home related, you may benefit from using a physical planner like the Focus Planner or the LifePlanner. The physical act of writing has, for many people, proven to be more effective for cognitive processing and coding, which basically just means you’ll actually remember it and prioritize it!

Physically Writing something down has been shown to:

Create : Encourages the creative process by activating more regions of the brain.
Remember : Works within the memory to determine what information to store and what to let go, helping you feel less overwhelmed.
Achieve : Helps achieve goals more effectively. This is because physical writing activates more senses, giving the memory of the goal more “importance” in your hippocampus.
Focus & Organize : Promote the feeling of being more organized. When you physically write your mind organizes as you are thinking, creating a natural organization of thoughts allowing you to focus on priorities.

How to use Erin Condren’s Planners Along With your Digital Planners

I like to think of my physical planner as the “balance” or “routine” planner to streamline my day. Let’s be real. It can be difficult to fit every single tiny little thing you need to do, handwritten, on one square. So instead, think of it as the “big concepts” planner and let the digital planners take care of the small stuff & the alarm reminders. Remember, the act of writing it down serves a different purpose than using a digital planner! We physically write to help our brains create, achieve, remember, and organize.

How to get Focused with Erin Condren's New Focus Collection

Yearly: Use this area to write down a goal, habit, routine, manifestation, or project in mind.

Monthly: To prevent overwhelm, just use the month squares as major reminders. Appointments, birthdays, important dates.

Daily:

Start with your current life, as is. What are the aspects of your life that occur repeatedly?
- Work
- Family
- Meals
- Social Life
- Health

Make sure that one thing from each of those categories ends up on your day. This helps promote balance and helps you prioritize what you can actually get done within the confines of one day. The Erin Condren planner allows for time blocking or creating checklists, so that each aspect of your life is covered.

2. As you get used to writing in your planner, start adding in the fun stuff at the bottom of your daily section! Want to try out that new recipe that you pinned yesterday? Put it on the planner! Want to take the kids to visit that dinosaur experience? Put it on the planner!

This is also a great space for writing one step per day toward achieving a goal!

Note Pages

Use these as a brain dump. Write down every single little thing that’s nagging at you. From little reminders, to big tasks to tackle, get it all down. Then, you can organize these into your digital planners to cover all the little in-between steps.

Note pages are also useful to keep a log of what apps you use with a note for the focus of each app, so you remember to check them for important dates, times, information, and reminders.

If you just have too much in your head, you may want to get a small companion journal so you can write freely without worrying about space. [link to note book]

Productivity Pages & Stickers

Truth? While these are for the fun of it, they also serve as little reminders. Stickers [link to stickers] give us color, image, and shape to transform something festive into something memorable. Brainstorm, doodle, put stickers on! Go for it!

While some of this may seem repetitive or redundant (why would I write that appointment down when it’s already on my iCal?) just remember, if using a physical planner along with your digital planners, what you’re really trying to do is make a task more tangible. Transferring information from the digital world into the physical world makes it more real and hopefully, more manageable…or at least more fun!