the best reasons to bid electronic calendars "adieu"

when it comes to calendars and planners, i'm a purist. google calendar, my smart phone calendar, ical...none of these really do it for me. ever since i was a wee middle schooler, i've been hopelessly devoted to the paper-based planner. every year, it's a source of excitement and agony, choosing the perfect new planner for the new year. what will serve my purposes best? what size? what style? august-august or january-december?  let's look at the myriad options...

first, we need to decide on style. i'm just going to ignore all the month-by-month planners because that's a little useless, in my opinion. we are interested only in week-by-week or day-by-day. these are the ones that give you the best venue for keeping track of appointments, projects, assignments, and plans. ecosystem life has kindly offered graphics for your viewing pleasure:

 week-by-week:

day-by-day:

personally, i'm partial to the week-by-week. i find that i don't necessarily do assignments and projects on certain days, so i like to have a running list of things i need to do on one side, and a place for appointments/classes on the other.

knowing that, i've gone through a few options:

ecosystem life planner

the first is the ecosystem life planner. i liked this planner a lot for it's "green" sourcing (you could even enter the special code for your planner and see where all the materials came from) and it's pretty colors. i have heard a little rumor, though, that this planner has been discontinued...but it's still a good one.

then there's the uncalendar. i love this planner so much i can't handle it. it's a little overwhelming, because everything is left blank and personalizable. i love it. but i don't always get it because sometimes i feel like it's a little too much.

uncalendar lifestyle

it's also ugly as sin, so i have to make my own collage-style cover for it. the other downside to uncalendars is that they're a little hard to find. but not impossible.

then there's the tried and true, beautiful, luxurious, and coveted moleskine. my basic pattern is to get a moleskine every other year. they're expensive, but hold together like a champ.

the classic is always a winner:

i'm really, really intrigued by this special evernote moleskine - this looks like some super high-tech stuff. it doesn't seem to have a planner version yet, but the notebook seems rad.

but my deal was done when i saw this yesterday at the PSU bookstore:

your eyes do not deceive you - that is indeed a limited edition le petit prince moleskine. it's a week-by-week (there is a beautiful yellow day-by-day one too, but it's humongous) with color illustrations from LPP on the insides of the covers. it comes with a bitty LPP themed desk calendar and address book. AND IT IS PERFECT.

i can't believe i just wrote that much about planners, but clearly this is a really important matter, so i guess it's warranted. 

bisoux!