A few months ago I shared my planner lineup for 2025 and in that lineup was my Sterling Ink Standard TN planner. It was probably the one I was most excited to use and a few months later, all I can say is that I absolutely love it! Being a first timer with a TN sized planner, I had a little bit of a hard time figuring out what to use all the pages for or even how to use them. But I think that now (February), I have a pretty good grasp of the layouts I really like.
Today I’m sharing a flip through of my first month in my 2025 Sterling Ink planner which is also my every day carry…. So beware of chaotic pages, lol.
Monthly Page
For the monthly spread, there’s nothing really special about it. I use it for what it is: a monthly overview of dates and events. I’m not much of a decorator when it comes to planners, so this page is pretty minimal. I had started the month with highlighting the first week for what would be our homeschool vacation annnndddd, I did not like how it looked. But it is what it is, we’re learning how to use this puppy, so mistakes are gonna happen. Other than the highlight, I very much enjoy the simplicity of this spread.
Weekly pages
This is probably where I enjoyed experimenting the most. Prior to putting pen to paper, I watched so many youtube videos on how to plan with a TN planner. I also pinned tons of pictures on pinterest with spreads that I could potentially use and didn’t really end up using any one particular layout that I had previously seen. Really, what I did was take pieces from different sources.
At first, I did sort of like what the spreads looked like, but there was something missing about them. You can see how I tried to tweak things a little bit towards the end of the month and I still wasn’t really happy with how the pages looked. This month, I’ve switched it around and can’t wait to show you how my spreads look now.
Notes Pages
For the notes section, I really struggled with how to use them. I wanted this part of my planner to be similar to a commonplace notebook but at the same time to be something I use practically. I also knew I wanted to consolidate my every day planning with my homeschool planning because it was not using my separate homeschool planner as much as I had hoped for.
So I started off with a cover page, again simple with minimal decor. And then I did a goals and intentions page, which if I’m honest, I hadn’t even referenced it again until today. I really don’t think I’ll be doing this anymore moving forward. Then I added a Gratitude section. I normally keep my gratitude log in my journal, but since I will be using this planner more than my journal, I decided to insert it in here. I only wrote on this page about half of the month, but I enjoyed having a page to reflect on whenever a thought of gratitude came to mind.
Next in the notes section is my homeschool planning pages. These pages are pretty self explanatory but I just wanted to keep track of the work we do on a daily basis along with the literature we read throughout the week. So on one side, I did my daily planning section and on the other side: weekly spelling words, literature and whatever notes about our week. I really like having this information in my everyday carry versus a whole separate planner.
The final pages consist of what would be my “commonplace” section. Here you’re going to find sermon notes and morning pages. I battled with the decision to do my meal planning here, but thats typically my “messy” planning and I was too scared to meal plan in this section. So other than homeschool tracking, sermon notes and morning pages, I didn’t really use this section as much as I hoped for.
For this being my first month in this planner, I think I did a good job with exploring and experimenting until I found something that worked (you’ll see in February’s flip through).
How’s it going in your own 2025 planners so far?
Let’s chat!