Finding the Best Planner When Recovering from Persistent Post-Concussion Syndrome/mild TBI (unabridged version)

Previously, I wrote about how a good planning and organizational system is crucial for recovery from Persistent Post-Concussion Syndrome (PCS)/mild Traumatic Brain Injury (mTBI), and then later suggested how you might create a good organizational and planning system for yourself.

As I mentioned, a high-quality planner provides the foundation for successful planning and organization.

In this post, I am going to get into the specifics of what to look for in a planner when you are an individual with persistent PCS/mTBI. At the bottom, I’ll have a link to my list of the best persistent PCS-/mTBI-friendly planners currently on the market (with product links to make your life easier).

The goal of a good planner

As a reminder, what we want with our planner is a single, centralized place for both our weekly schedule and our to-do list. That means having our appointments, deadlines, and breaks— as well as our prioritized to-do’s for the week— all laid out on a single 1- or 2-page spread.

Like a well-designed worksheet, a great planner provides us with the structure to get the best and most user-friendly 1-2-page weekly spread for each week.

What goes into creating this great worksheet? Roughly speaking, you want something that enables you to: a) capture all the appointments, obligations, and tasks you have for the week; b) prioritize your to-do’s within the limitations of your appointments and other obligations.

So, with those goals in mind, what are the components of a great planner?

Components of a good planner for individuals with persistent PCS/mTBI

Here’s what to look for in a new planner when you have persistent PCS/mTBI:

The Must-haves:

A) Monthly and weekly time views— with an easy way to go back and forth between these.

A monthly calendar gives you a Big Picture sense of your schedule and makes planning easier when deadlines and multi-step processes are involved.

A weekly calendar gives you the level of detail you need to translate your projects into specific, achievable tasks you can take action on— so you don’t get frozen in inaction.

Without a weekly view, it would be harder to take action on anything other than going to appointments. Without a monthly view, it would be harder to see the Big Picture of what you have to do and to relate it to your long-term goals.

You need both.

B) Space for appointments and to-do list items to appear on the same 2-page spread (or single-page spread) for the week.

How many times do you write things down you have to do— only to forget what you did with the thing you wrote it down on?

Having a single 1- to 2-page-spread to write it down on— and then later review— largely prevents that from happening.

It also enables you to holistically visualize how your appointments, time obligations, to-do’s, breaks and other aspects of your schedule fit together. On the one hand, this gives you a sense of what is non-negotiable in your schedule, such as medical appointments or work. It also helps prevent you from overstretching or double-booking yourself. On the other hand, it also gives you a sense of the time and energy limits you will have in a given day or week to get the things done on your to-do list.

And that, in turn, should help you figure out which of your top priorities and to-do list items you should be focusing on.

C) A time grid in your weekly view. This makes your schedule look less visually chaotic.

A time grid also helps you better visualize busier times of the day, so you can thus plan breaks to compensate.

Perhaps most importantly, without a time grid, it is highly possible you will have a new appointment or time commitment to write down that occurs before the first one you’ve written down for a given day. In that scenario, you’d either have to: a) write your appointments down in the wrong order— which makes memory lapses or confusion more likely; or b) use pencil or erasable ink (which smudges easily) for everything on your calendar— or cross things out and write them down again along with your new appointments as they come in, which will look messy and chaotic.

Either way, without a time grid to easily slot in your appointments and time commitments at the appropriate times, you’ll be adding to your cognitive load. And that leads to cognitive fatigue.

D) A to-do list that: a) has enough space to write tasks down on each line; and b) is broken out into 2-4 categories with at least 10 spaces for items in at least 3 of the categories (or 15 spaces for 2 categories).

If a to-do list doesn’t have enough space in which to write down your tasks, it’s not really helpful to you.

Categories make it easier to brainstorm and remember all the things you want to do in the various contexts of your life. They also make it easier to break things down into smaller tasks, which helps you get started on them.

The Strongly Preferred-to-haves:

E) Next to the to-do list, on the left: spaces to write in numbers, words or other notations for prioritizing to-do list items. (Ideally, those spaces will be bubbles, squares, or mini-lines.)

Listing all the things you have to do is only the first part of the planning job. The next step is to prioritize among these to-do list items for the week.

Although you can leave yourself room to do this on the left side of each item, it’s less convenient and easy to forget— which leads to cross-outs and a more visually chaotic planner.

F) 5-10 spaces to write down priority to-do’s and tasks for each day.

This enables you to prioritize a narrower subset of priorities and tasks on a given day— which should make them feel more doable, help your focus, and give you a greater sense of accomplishment when you succeed in accomplishing some or all of these.

If your planner does not have this, you can instead use a Gazelle Planner sticky note each day as a supplement to your planner to accomplish the same thing. However, that can feel less organized, and it is easier to misplace these.

G) A place to jot down notes, without having to write them down in your schedule or on your to-do list.

Some monthly-weekly planners have a place for note-taking on the same 2-page spread as the to-do list and schedule; some monthly-weekly planners have 1-page spreads that use blank pages right next to them; other monthly-weekly planners have 2-page spreads of blank space between each week.

It is usually helpful to have some dedicated space to jot down notes in your planner— for things you research, for taking notes on phone calls or medical appointments, for jotting down questions to ask in a meeting, or for use as a worksheet to break bigger tasks down into smaller ones, as just a few examples.

You can use another notebook to take notes for the examples mentioned above. For preparing for phone calls and medical appointments, you also can use another notebook— or the Lamare Meeting Notebook. However, in order to reduce reduce the number of notebooks to keep track of and to reduce the chance of forgetting how to access the things you have written down, it is preferable to have everything written down in one place, whenever possible.

The Other Nice-to-haves:

H) A place for reflection, so you don’t forget what you’ve accomplished and what your priorities are.

Sure, you can skip this step and go onto the next week. However, you’ll find that reflecting after each week provides two important benefits: a) it helps you see what worked and what didn’t, so you can course-correct in the short-term and fine-tune your organizational system in the long-term; b) it helps you recognize the small and big successes which we sometimes tend to forget— and that helps us feel more inspired to go out and grab new ones for ourselves.

I) A place to do longer-term planning for yourself, if you so choose— such as 3-month planning, 6-month planning, or 12-month planning. Blank sheets are fine; dedicated spaces are even better.

You could easily do this in a separate notebook, as well; however, once again, there would be real benefits to keeping this in the same place as as the rest of your planning when it comes to finding and remembering it. And that, as a result, will mean you’ll be that much more likely to use it.

How to use your planner

So, how can you use your planner effectively in your PCS/mTBI recovery?

I propose a way to do just that in my post, Creating an Effective Organizational System When Recovering from Concussion/mTBI.

A Caveat: no planner is perfect… so adapt it to your needs

I have yet to find a planner that is the perfect one either for my clients or for myself. However, you can modify planners to suit your own needs. If your planner lacks a feature you’d like, then modify it to give it to yourself. If filling in every category of your planner feels overwhelming… then just don’t do it: it’s more important to use it imperfectly on a regular basis than it is to use it perfectly on an irregular basis.

As a coach, one of the things I really enjoy is partnering with each client to create their optimal organizing and planning system, according to how their mind works. If you’d like to explore doing that, click here.

Click here to see my list of the best planners for individuals with persistent PCS/mTBI, as of early 2024.