This is the fourth post I share which is connected to the creation and sharing of the Book Your Year Planner – 90 days at a time. Leading up to the launch of the planner I will share pages from it as a free printable.

This post talks about the evening part from the routine sheet I shared in the previous post. And also includes an extra printable to get an overview of your notebooks and writing projects.

Read on if you want to . . . 

• get a free printable
• get an overview and put together your own monthly writing capsule stack
• pick three actions for the evening that align with mind, body, and spirit

First, if you haven’t already done so for the morning part print out one worksheet for January here, and if you want an overview of the first quarter of 2021 print out two more for February and March.

Decluttering paper and projects.

It is the first evening of the new year. I am sitting on the couch with two blankets because the heating is off. Everyone else in the house is asleep. From outside I can hear some fireworks but otherwise, it is calm and quiet.

I have spent the day on planning and decluttering both my space and my mind and now I am writing this blog post. In many ways it is a perfect day for me because I got to reconnect and from this a sense of clarity emerge.

Clarity was not the predominant feeling at noon. Through my morning routine I knew how I wanted to spend my day but papers kept swirling around my desk and ideas intermingled in ways that was not doing anything good for my creative flow.

I wanted to dream and plan for a great 2021 instead I tired my brain with clutter and clusters of tangled ideas. So I went back to basic.

First I went through the notes on paper in my folder and highlighted the things I thought were of value, wrote them down in one place, and tossed the rest. Then I made a document on my laptop with a content list and gathered my non-fiction writing from other folders under the proper headline. The last thing I got around to was to get an overview of what I want to learn in January and sort out the resources I have lined up on my desk and on my laptop.

For tomorrow I want to go through my fiction writing. Throughout the year I got so far as to gather all of my writing projects in one place but I want it to feel more like a breathing space for stories than just a storage place for papers.

I made this printable to help sort out the different folders, journals, notebooks, stacks of paper, stories, and projects I have piling up.

From this list, I narrow it down and pick the notebook and the journal I am going to use this month. I put the document in the active folder on my laptop and I sort out which part of my writing project I am working on right now and separate it from the rest and put it in a tray on my desk. This is my monthly writing capsule stack. The printable helps me to get an overview of what I have to pick from.

From doing this I learned that I want decluttering to be part of my evening routine so I can go directly to the dream and writing part the next day.

Mind, body and spirit in the evening

I never had an evening routine apart from brushing my teeth. So while a set of morning habits feels natural to me I can’t say the same for how I end the day. But as I wrote above I will spend 5-10 minutes decluttering and this I do to for my mind. For the body, I will take a bath and I think I will try out listening to a song for the spirit part. If a choose a new song each evening I can put together a playlist on Spotify and then I have some music to listen to while writing.

The evening routine you come up with could be the same all year but I like to fill out the routine sheet each month as a continuous commitment. And sometimes I also like to change things up a bit during the year. 

Create Your Perfect Evening

• 1

  Use the daily routine sheet and print out the extra PDF

• 2

  Write the amount of notebooks and writing projects etc. down and select your monthly writing capsule stack.

• 3

  Come up with three things for mind, body, and spirit you could do in the evening

The next Book your year post will be on how the daily rhythm is in between the morning and evening routines and include a free daily schedule printable

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