Week 4 with the Day Grid Balancer

For the past three weeks I had been messing with and using Dave Seah’s Day Grid Balancer (Draft 2), tweaking it around for my personal hectic yet procrastinating lifestyle. It is unlike any other day planner I have ever used. Instead of perfect grids and evenly-spaced lines for input from the first draft, the second draft of the DGB has little boxes and colorful wavy streams.

Now, naturally, I was clueless at first sight of this sheet. I mean, what? Arbitrarily-positioned boxes? Random, albeit pretty, streams? What kind of planner is this?

Of course, it’s not Dave Seah’s job to tell me how to use it (or is it?). After all, he released it under a Creative Commons license, so I’m free to edit the heck out of it. Given that freedom, I set out to create the perfect, original planner.

One of my greatest weaknesses is that, given too much freedom, my mind locks up and refuses to let loose my creative muse (if indeed I have one). The problem becomes worse when dealing with anything not involving a pencil or pen in my hand. So when I opened up the file in Illustrator, the first response was, “Now what?”

Well, let’s start by tweaking the streams around.

For starters, I felt there were too many boxes for the red brushstroke stream, so I limited it to 3 groups of four. Then the stream was lengthened and tilted to span more across the width of the page. The blue and pink streams, meanwhile, converge as you move down the page. The double-helix streams remain in the middle of the page.

With this structure, I eventually categorized the streams into thus:

• The red stream represents anything out of weekly routine that I ought to incorporate for just this week. I don’t think this will be used much, honestly.
• The blue and pink streams are for web design tasks. This includes steps for completing this site, and for completing any freelance work I may have.
• The green and lime streams are for hobbies. For this week and possibly subsequent ones, any creative writing and poetry, and my current comic-in-progress, are on the agenda.

So far, it seems to work. The hobbies go hand in hand in terms of what I can do with my time outside of the computer. The convergence of the blue and pink streams represents my desire to reach a common goal at the end of the week: significant progress done on the web end.

What about the boxes, then?

This, I’m not quite sure yet. I’m been using them as checkboxes for individual tasks, like “finish the blog title” or “write a poem with at least 50 lines”. First steps are connected to the first checkbox of each group, then the second steps to the second, and so forth.

But somewhat that doesn’t quite do it. I still find my sheet underwhelmingly incomplete by the end of the week (which, by the way, starts on Mondays). Perhaps I’m not breaking up my tasks enough, or perhaps I’m just procrastinating too much. I do tend to get distracted easily; maybe that’s just it.

I will continue to tweak the DGB and refine my method of use for it. I’ve been filling it out at the beginning of each week; maybe I ought to fill it out only when the task is complete?