Your diary is one of the essential tools for the daily organization of your working days. Depending on your preferences, it can be electronic, in paper format, weekly, daily or even monthly. Discover now the different possible variations of this essential to optimize your time and your productivity.
Electronic or paper: which professional diary is right for you?
Many professionals hesitate to choose the electronic diary. However, the latter is particularly recommended for all those who travel more often or who need to consult and modify their schedule regularly. Viewable and editable on different media such as your smartphone, your computer or even your tablet, an electronic diary becomes as mobile as you and follows you everywhere without taking up additional space. A simple internet connection will be necessary to allow you to access all of your appointments and the information indicated in your notes.
However, if you have a job that does not require too much travel or you prefer to use a more traditional paper format, the classic diary will remain the ideal tool. Depending on your needs, several types of diary exist and may suit you.
Paper diary: which period and overview to choose?
The right time for your diary
There are many types of planners. Those covering the school year, from September to September, will be perfect if you are teachers or have a consistent job, on the other hand, they will be much less practical if you have to note appointments or orders for vacation areas. Indeed, the pages corresponding to these days are generally divided more narrowly and do not offer the same space.
Other diaries cover the calendar year, from January to the end of December. It is towards these that your attention should be turned if you wish to obtain a diary corresponding to a classic activity. They will also allow you to clearly visualize your appointments by day, by hour and by week, depending on the overview you choose, but we will come back to this important element in more detail a little later. The great advantage of the diary covering a calendar year will also be to offer you a permanent trace of your activity. Whether you need to swap appointments or not, cancel orders or postpone some, everything will remain listed. You will therefore be able to take stock of your work and your organization easily and will quickly see how to improve it.
There are also diaries covering 16 months, from September to December of the following year. Although they are useful when starting an activity at the end of the year, they do not present any major differences with a calendar covering the calendar year. On the other hand, they will have the advantage of allowing you to plan long-term deadlines for certain projects.
The importance of insight
If the period covered by your diary is important , the overview that it will allow you to have on your activity is even more important. This is often what should help you choose your support. Depending on the job you have, you will not have the same needs. If you have many daily appointments and need to write down the information that corresponds to each one, a diary with one page per day may be useful to you. This will give you enough space to write everything down without intruding on your next appointment. In other cases, appointments follow one another, but you only need a few lines to write them down. A visualization in the form of a weekly schedule will then be sufficient. Each double page will correspond to a week, while the days will be presented in columns. If each of your days is dedicated to a specific task, a monthly presentation might suit you. In this case, your month is divided into small boxes on a double page.
The goal will therefore be to find the insight you really need. Detailed enough for some, much more concise for others, there is no right or wrong choice. Your diary must be adapted to your profession, your way of organizing yourself and be pleasant to use.
Choosing a hassle-free format
Whether daily, weekly or monthly, your diary will accompany you on a daily basis during your working days. Its format will therefore have to be adapted. If you don't have to move it, you are free to choose according to your preferences, however, if you plan to use it on public transport, during your appointments or in different places, it will be better opt for a compact format that fits easily into a bag or handbag. The A5 format lends itself well to the exercise, but don't hesitate to test other possibilities with small notepads before making your choice. To push your choice into details, know that a spiral binding will give you the opportunity to remove sheets when necessary, but will also make your diary more fragile when traveling. In each case, you may need to test several models before finding your ideal planner.
