Always Busy, Always Catching Up: Simple Planning for Everyday Life

Despite having more tools than ever to organise our lives, many people still feel busy and behind.

We live in a time where there is no shortage of tools designed to help us organise our lives. Apps for planning, reminders, calendars, habit tracking, to-do lists - often all promising to help us feel more in control.

And yet, many people describe the opposite experience.

I often hear clients say they feel like they’re constantly trying to catch up, or that they’re chasing their own tail. Not because they aren’t trying, but because everything feels scattered and slightly overwhelming.

Planning in a distracting world

Most digital organisation tools live on our phones. And our phones, by design, are busy environments.

Even when an app itself is helpful, it exists alongside:

• emails

• messages

• notifications

• social media

• news alerts

Many of us will be able to think of times when we’ve picked up our phone to check one thing, and then found ourselves reading something else entirely, without even noticing how it happened.

I know I’ve done it myself, picking up my phone for a specific task, only to put it down a few minutes later without even opening the app I picked it up for in the first place.

It’s a bit like a digital version of walking into a room and forgetting why you went in there.

In Deep Work, Cal Newport describes how frequent task-switching leaves our attention divided, making it harder to stay focused, even when we think we’re only briefly checking something.

So when we’re trying to organise our lives on the same device as all those distractions, it’s no wonder it can leave us feeling overwhelmed and sometimes no further forward.

It’s not about a lack of discipline. It’s about the environment we’re asking our attention to work within.

Pen and paper planning is still favoured by many people, even with the abundance of digital tools available.

Writing things down physically helps externalise mental load, moving thoughts, plans and decisions out of our heads and onto paper. Research into handwriting and cognition suggests that writing by hand can help us slow down and think things through more than typing does (Mueller & Oppenheimer, 2014).

There’s also something about the pace of writing by hand. Because it takes a little more time and effort, it can naturally encourage us to be more selective, to pause, prioritise, and think more realistically about what we’re actually trying to fit into a day or week.

When plans are written down and kept somewhere you can see them - on a desk, fridge or notebook - they don’t require logging in, opening an app, or navigating notifications. They’re simply there.

This isn’t about nostalgia or rejecting technology. It’s about recognising that different tools support us in different ways.

Before adding anything else

As we enter the beginning of a new year, we’re often told to start with fresh new habits, goals, routines or changes.

But what’s talked about far less is how those new things fit into lives that are already busy. Instead, many people try to squeeze them in as and when they can.

Over time, this approach often starts to falter, not because the ideas were wrong, but because there was never any time made for them in the first place.

In my experience, both personally and in my work, taking the time to plan and work out how to fit in something new is often more helpful than diving straight in.

Seeing what’s already there - commitments, energy levels, time, priorities - makes it easier to be realistic from the start.

How planning has helped me

Over the years, I’ve found that simple planning can be genuinely supportive, particularly during busier periods of life where there’s been a lot to juggle.

For me it’s not about doing more. It’s about getting things out of my head, working out what matters, and making a plan so you’re not having to constantly think about it.

It’s also not about planning life so tightly that you lose all sense of fun or spontaneity. In practice, having a plan often creates more time, not less, making it easier to enjoy the present without that nagging feeling that you’ve forgotten something.

Simple planning for everyday life

Different approaches work for different people. Some people thrive with digital tools, others don’t, and many move between the two depending on what life looks like at the time.

If you're a visual, pen and paper kind of person, I’ve created a small set of planners designed to support simple planning for everyday life. A place to get things out of your head and make space for what matters most.

They’re there if they’re helpful, to use in whatever way works for you.

References

Newport, C. (2016). Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Piatkus.

Mueller, P. A., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014). The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking. Psychological Science, 25(6), 1159–1168.

If you’d like more real-life reflections like this, head back to the blog page to keep reading.

.