My Daily Planning Routine (and the One Habit I Never Skip)
Part 2 of the My imPERFECT Planning Routine series. If you missed the overview of the whole system, start there. This is the daily layer, which is honestly the least glamorous and the most important.
Quick note: this post contains affiliate links. Full details in the My Tools section at the bottom.
My daily planning routine isn't fancy. It's just consistent.
I don’t spend hours in my planner and I definitely don’t color code anything. Most days it's a few minutes here and there, wrapped around real life. But it's the thing that keeps my whole planning system alive, because a weekly spread is only as good as the daily habit that keeps you coming back to it!
Why I stopped planning in the morning
For a long time I tried to plan my day in the morning, because that's what you're supposed to do, right? Wake up, coffee, plan the day, conquer.
Then I became a mom and my mornings evaporated. There simply wasn't enough time to sleep as much as I could and figure out what I needed to do and actually do it. I was starting so many days frazzled and on the wrong foot, and it was stressing me out before the day even began.
The fix wasn't waking up earlier or finding more discipline. The fix was moving the planning to the night before. When I figure out what tomorrow needs before tomorrow starts, I wake up already semi prepped and aware of the day. I'm not scrambling to build a plan while the day is actively happening to me. The whole morning feels more peaceful, and that feeling of peace was the entire point of planning in the first place.
That's how the evening check-in became my non-negotiable.
The three check-ins
My daily routine is three small check-ins. Morning, midday, and evening. Here's the important part: only one of them is required. If I do nothing else, I do the evening one. The other two are bonuses, and some days they don't happen at all.
That single decision changed everything. Instead of a routine with three chances to fail, I have one small commitment and two nice-to-haves.
The morning: two minutes of journaling
Most mornings, while the kids are eating breakfast, I do a quick entry in my Peacefully Productive journal from Hustle Sanely. It's a prompted journal, so I'm not staring at a blank page trying to be profound. I answer the prompts and it takes about two minutes. It positions me in a place of gratitude and reminds me what’s important as I head into the bustle of the day.
I don't do it every single day, but I do it the majority of days, and that's enough. It clears the fog and sets the tone before the day takes over.
The midday check-in: less a routine, more a rescue
The midday check-in is the loosest of the three, and honestly, some days it simply doesn't happen. Nothing bad follows. The evening check-in catches everything anyway.
When it does happen, it's usually on my lunch break, or in the moment when I realize work has completely swallowed me and I've lost the thread. It's my way of coming up for air. I look at my work planner, an Erin Condren Daily Duo, and ask one question: am I actually hitting my priorities, and what needs to happen next?
The evening check-in: the non-negotiable
Here's the scene. The kids are in bed. The house has had a quick tidy. And before I settle into hobby time, I sit down at my fun desk and open my planner.
Some nights it takes five minutes, and five minutes is genuinely plenty. Some nights I'm in the mood and it stretches longer. Either way, I do three small things:
Look at what actually happened today, not what I hoped would happen, and move anything that didn't get done. Unfinished tasks just get walked forward if it makes sense to do so. I also add tasks that I completed that weren’t in my planner.
Check in on my habits in the tracker. Not to grade myself. If I've been missing one, I look at the rest of the week, get honest about the likelihood of it actually happening, and schedule it in or make it a priority for a specific day.
Slot in anything new that came up during the day.
The evening check-in works because it's a baseline. My planner and my real life stay in conversation with each other, and tomorrow morning starts already known.
It's become a little doorway into my own evening. Kids down, tidy done, check-in done, and now the rest of the night is mine.
The sticky note system
Quick confession: new tasks almost never go straight into my planner.
When something comes to mind during the day, it lands on a sticky note or a brain dump notepad/notebook. My desk is basically a capture net. Stickies on my monitor, stickies on the desk, stickies stuck to the outside or even the inside of my planner, or a notepad set to the side. Anything and everything goes there, and I loosely sort them as I write them, home stuff on one note, work stuff on another.
Then during the evening check-in, each sticky gets a decision. Tomorrow? Later this week? A someday list? The sticky note catches it, the evening check-in files it.
This tiny buffer keeps my planner from becoming a chaotic dumping ground, and it means I never need my planner open to capture a thought. If your spreads have ever been ruined by seventeen panic-scribbled tasks, try this for a week! Thank me later.
Flexibility beats rigidity, every time
Speaking from experience, a rigid routine works until it doesn't, and then it collapses completely. A flexible routine bends around a hard day and is still standing the next morning.
This rhythm has survived work crunches, sick kids, and weeks where I was running on fumes, because the bar is low enough that I always come back to it. One required check-in. Two bonuses. A pile of sticky notes doing the holding until I'm ready.
That's what I’m coining the imperfect practice.
Try it yourself
If you want the exact framework I use to keep this routine going, the Imperfect Practice Sheet is my free one-page weekly sheet built around this same low-bar philosophy. It's the entry point to my whole system, and it's yours free when you join The Imperfect Spread. Grab the free Practice Sheet here.
My Tools
Everything that shows up in this routine, all in one place:
The planner: Laurel Denise Anne, my daily driver. Code IMPERFECT10 for 10% off. [link: https://tidd.ly/3IyLSgc]
The morning journal: Peacefully Productive journal from Hustle Sanely. Code SARAH86. [link: https://hustlesanely.com?bg_ref=PNiiHLyeg4]
The work planner: Erin Condren Daily Duo.
The printables: The Imperfect Practice Kit, 7 pages designed to ride along in the Anne. [link to shop]
The freebie: The Imperfect Practice Sheet. [link to signup]
Disclosure: Some of the links above are affiliate or referral links, which means I may earn a small commission if you shop through them, at no extra cost to you. I only share tools I genuinely use in my own routine. Thanks for supporting Imperfectly Planned!
Next up in the series: my weekly planning routine, which is where everything comes together and honestly my favorite part of the whole system.
