Last week while cleaning at our rental house, I had a little accident and smashed my pinky finger on my right hand, which is also my dominant hand. As my poor little finger is still a long way from being fully healed and used as usual, I am finding all sorts of tasks more challenging than normal. Everything from opening jars, to washing dishes, from tying shoelaces to writing a sentence—it all is a lot harder without the use of one little bitty hurt finger!
The inability to write properly with a pen or pencil has been one of the most annoying challenges I have had to deal with this week. I did not realize how crucial the curling under of the little finger is to being able to hold a pencil and form letters! It has been a real frustration at times because I am a paper planner as opposed to a digital planner. I just cannot think as clearly about my day unless I write some things down physically on paper, and when that was not possible, I found myself floundering without a good plan. For example, the first day after my injury, I wanted to write a to do list, but instead I had to type up a note on my phone. I kept forgetting I had the list there and wondered what I needed to be doing all day. Another day I sat down to make a meal plan and grocery list. I simply could not do that digitally, so I made a spidery, somewhat painful attempt at writing my meal plan out as usual. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked! Later in the week I needed to do a brain dump and also had some school planning to do. I knew that there was no way I could write fast enough to do a good brain dump, so I ended up typing it out instead. I got it done, but I did not feel the same sense of relief that I do when I actually write everything out with paper and pen. Today my hand was feeling good enough that I was able to transfer some of my thoughts from the screen to the notebook, and that helped clarify my thoughts a lot.
This experience has really reinforced for me the need to give myself the time and blank paper space to go ahead and be the analog planner that I naturally am. I already knew from trial and error that I do better with paper planning overall, even though I still do keep a digital calendar up to date (mostly to keep in communication with my digital planner husband!), and I also use a note-keeping app or two occasionally. But after having been in a good routine with my Happy Planner and various composition notebooks, this week of being forced to use digital notes and lists was surprisingly inefficient for me. So once this little finger of mine is all better, I look forward to getting back in the analog planner groove again with gusto!
How about you? Are you a digital planner? Or do you prefer paper planning like me? Or maybe you like a combination of both! If you don’t have any idea what works best for you, one of my favorite bloggers and organization gurus, Mystie Winkler has a fabulous little tool to help you find out what planning style suits you best, as well as TONS of amazingly helpful resources over at Simplified Organization. (And if you use my affiliate link to purchase any of her courses, if helps me cover the costs of running this website, so thank you!)