For many of us, Christmas shopping winds down just as the hunt ramps up for the perfect calendar for 2017. There’s the traditional wall calendar for the family, the academic planner for the student, and the daily planner for the professional. But like most things in our culture, the options don’t end there. Planners and calendars are big business, with weighty brands like the Erin Condren LifePlanner, Plum Paper, Passion Planner, and Sacred Ordinary Days. Many of today’s planners can be customized and designed exactly to your own specifications—for a price, of course. You choose the style, the layout, the binding, and the theme. And if that’s not enough, you could simply create your own calendar, using the bullet journaling system that’s taken on a life of its own over at Pinterest. Bullet journaling is a scrapbooking planning mash-up for those who are artists at heart but can’t quit their day jobs. With so many approaches to organizing our days, certainly there is something to be learned from the calendar systems we choose. In this episode of Persuasion, Erin Straza and Hannah Anderson dissect the trends of planners and calendars and tease out what our planner-of-choice says about our personalities, goals, and gifting. If you’ve not selected your 2017 system yet, this discussion can help you sort out the options and land on the calendar option that’s the best fit for you.

Listen to Persuasion Episode 80:

Links from the show:

Erin Condren,  LifePlanner

Plum Paper

Passion Planner

Sacred Ordinary Days

Bullet Journaling

Theme music by Maiden Name.